Drones Over Europe

Before we start this episode, some quick housekeeping. We have a website, homefrontpod.com. On it, you'll find Signals, our weekly roundup of news on hybrid threats, mostly from Europe and across the Atlantic. It comes with a map so you can see at a glance what's happened in the last week and where. We also have Homefront Lab, where we publish deep dives that usually go with our episodes. Last week's episode already has an article you can read, and there are recommendations for books and other things worth reading.

So that's homefrontpod.com. Homefront. The civilian face of modern conflict. What happened, what's happening now, and what we can learn. So welcome to Homefront Episode 2. I'm Luke Irving and I'm Giuliano Stochino-Weiss Vice.

We talked about the nature of war that's been changing, and we quickly touched upon drones, especially drones over airports. So we decided with Luke to dedicate this episode to drones in general, especially the ones over Europe that's been hitting the news. One thing it's clear that there are more and more drone sightings and more disruptions due to drones. In the last year and years, and it's only growing exponentially. And that's why we decided for this episode, I am gonna be looking into the smaller drones, so the ones that you are able to buy off any commercial website. And Luke is gonna be looking into the larger military drones.

So a bit of scene setting. Imagine you're trying to catch a flight from Warsaw and you could make your way over there early in the morning to find the airport is closed. And the clo its airport is not closed because of the weather or there's a strike. It's because a military drone has crossed the border into Poland. So on the night of the 9th to the 10th of September 25, Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine. Now whether that was deliberate or by accident, we're not sure.

So Warsaw's shopping Airport suspended flights for several hours. And that's a good illustration of a large military drone entering a country's airspace. So it's not just military stories, but how this is all looped together in a civilian environment is either way civilians are caught up either indirectly or directly by drones entering country's airspace or certainly into an airport's operating space. So Giuliano, do you want to start off with small drones and talk more about how they impact airports? So as I said, drones are now hitting the news. And the reason behind that is that between January 2024 and November 2025, drone disruptions at European airports roughly quadrupled across more than 24 airports in 12 countries.

In plain words, let's also just quickly define what a drone is. A drone is an aircraft with nobody on board. That's why you will be reading the word UAV or UAS, so unmanned aerial vehicle or System. What I'm gonna be talking right now are the ones also mentioned that are the more hobby ones, but they can cause quite a disruption in quite a few locations around Europe. One I've actually been somewhat part of. Last year, as I said, I am based in Brussels.

And last year on the 4th of November in 2025, drones shot off the airport, the Zaventham Airport, for the first time. 54 flights, including mine, were cancelled. And 400 to 500 travelers had to spend the night at the terminal. Obviously, in my case, I could just go b back home, but it was a huge annoyance, and I looked into the smaller drones exactly because I had the the firsthand experience. And what I found is that it's not just airports. Actually, airports are perhaps the the smaller number of these attacks or surveillances, and it's typically bases.

naval shipyards or nuclear power plants. The International Institute for Strategic Studies looked at 144 drone incursions across Europe between August 2024 and February 2026, and about half were over military sites. And one thing that is perhaps alarming that one was a base that holds US nuclear bombs. And I asked myself what is it that they're actually doing? Why is this something that it's constantly in the news. So there are three layers.

One is the disrupting element. So they are actually trying to disrupt, for example, an airport, its operations. They're also watching, they're trying to see how a specific military site or an airport reacts to a drone incursion. But mostly the easiest put, they're testing the defenses. So Belgium's defense minister Theor Franken said that small drones first tested the frequencies used to jam the the drones. And then the larger drones came in on a different frequency.

And I quote, This is not the work of amateurs. So in plain words, they first tested what exactly is the jamming frequency, and that's when they started to send the bigger drones. And that was perhaps both a testing as well as a disruption at the same time. And the biggest difficulty with these small ones is to actually find them. The typical radars are not built For objects the size of a bird. And the difficulty with this is identifying them, but even more difficult is to identify who's flying them.

So the Germanist Chancellor Friedrich Merz in October 2025 said, I quote, our assumption that Russia is behind most of these drone flights. And that's exactly the word our assumption is because they are unable to find who actually, or prove it rather, who flew. These drones. And it gets back a little bit to what we were discussing in episode one, the attribution aspect and keeping things just below the threshold. So this kind of hybrid war that is being waged against Europe. And also to note in this word that our assumption is the kind of way that the plausible formulation of the sentence, because if Russia is clearly accused of something, they will also Take this as an aggression.

Russia obviously denies it, and no government has really publicly proved who flew any single airport drone. And I think it's listeners might be asking why you've touched on it, but why do you need to close an airport for the sake of a small drone? And well, the answer is when these small drones go in, you have absolutely no idea what their intent is and what they're trying to do. If it's actually a direct target, and we back to episode last episode and we talked about Leipzig. And that was clearly a a drone with explosives on it. You've got to play on the side of caution.

So every time there's a drone, unidentified drone, flying object going near an airport, the authorities have to close it down or suspend it at least until that's finished. Exactly. Nobody can tell at once what it is or who's flying it. And the reason why we brought up in episode one the Leipzig incident is because that's the first time we actually saw a drone with an explosive. But Also, a drone hitting a plane is a real risk. We've seen this with with burst strikes.

So really the caution is the only way to go ahead. And in this way, the attacker wins because we cannot be operating with drones flying around and it's super cheap and super simple to disrupt airports. With massive economic implications if you if you close down an airport for an extended period of time. Which I think is a good segue into now looking at larger drones, but There's a distinction here because this is definitely moving into the military spaces as military drones I wanna discuss now, the larger drones. And effectively they're they're incorporated into current active conflicts. So let's go back to the Polish incident in twenty twenty five.

So in that case, Russian drones crossed into the Polish airspace. That would have been flagged up on military air control, airspace control. Fighter jets are scrambled. In this case also Dutch F 35s under NATO arrangements are also scrambled. And the drones are shot down. So what in terms of civilian environment, Warsaw's shopping, airport suspended flights for several hours.

Like I said at the start, it was closed for that period of time. But I think it's important to note the airport wasn't the target itself. We don't know if the drones simply strayed off course, you know, military terms an accident, incident. But either way, the state has to react like that because it, you know, it doesn't know what they are, don't know if it's deliberate and This is gets really dangerous now because you could go into active war territory because Poland is not part of the co directly part of the conflict in Ukraine. You know I think a useful example if we think back to twenty fifteen on the Turkish Syrian border, to give an illustration of how reactive states can be to this Russian fighter jet straight into Turkish airspace for a very brief time. And the Turks were not gonna tolerate that and they immediately shot it down To the point where it was so close the Syrian airspace that aircraft actually crashed in Syria.

I think one of the aircrew was killed, another was rescued at later time within Syrian territory. but Turkey gave a very clear signal like it's unacceptable to cross our airspace with military assets and and reacted that way. So moving on to more lethal event events that have happened lately, and I'm gonna move away from airports and actually bring up a maritime incident that's happened very recently. So in the Black Sea, over the 14th and 15th of October this year, two tankers caught fire near Soluna Canal, which is off Romania's coast. Romania's president said both were struck by drones. At least seven of the twelve crew of the tanker Wayne Trader, sorry, Wine Trader, are missing, presumed dead.

So this vessel is not a military vessel. This is a, am I understanding correctly that this is a civilian vessel? tanker. Yeah, exactly. Thanks for the sort of clarification there. Yeah, it's it's a civilian vessel, both of the civilian vessels, normal commercial vessels going about their business in the Black Sea.

And so I'm curious, in this case, did did Romania attribute it to Russian origin, given that this is a a bigger military kind of drone? So there's there's doing some open source checks, NATO military source said in Rutos Reuters, sorry, that the drone was of Russian origin. However, Romania has not formally blamed Russia. Again, though, civilian sailors, that doesn't help the civilian sailors who were killed and the and the commercial companies have lost their assets. So I think what the what the impact here is Russia is attribuable. Probably the trade is related to Ukraine.

The routes are certainly close to Ukraine, the trade routes. By attacking commercial shipping, you can deny an economic trade and source of material for for Ukraine and source of income for Ukraine. Clearly though, if it's happening near Romania, it's quite an escalation in terms of you now bringing in other countries similar to the Polish incident. And I I think we'll see more of this. And I of course I won't go into details, but this is happening right now in the Strait of Humas. due to the the Iran conflict, both the Americans and Iranians effectively, the Americans trying to protect international shipping, the Iranians targeting shipping for their military objectives.

So that was a a maritime example, but then moving away from sort of the Russian incidences or Russian labeled drones. There's actually a very recent one on the 8th of October in Saudi Arabia where a Hufi military drone attacked King Halid's International Airport in Riyadh. Very serious incident, killed three people, including a Saudi airline pilot, and damaged a Saudi passenger plane. And clearly the airport itself is was the target. Vs trying to enlarge Conflict and bringing damage to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabians are clearly backing the the government forces in in Yemen.

Hufis being a proxy for Iran. The very serious incident where the Hufis, I suspect, are trying to send a message for to Saudi Arabia that this war will come to you the more you get involved and interfere with what we're trying to do in Yemen. So this this is a regional situation. And again, with the Iran conflict, myself spending a lot of of business in the Middle East, airspace being closed all the time due to the Iran conflict, very, very difficult to travel earlier this year in the Middle East due to airspace being closed from missiles and everything associated with that. So one thing that I find interesting in all of this is how people woke up from one day to another and the Riyadh and if we go back a little bit, Dubai and other places around the Gulf, one day or another they experienced the full force of of war and their lives have been changed very quickly and their entire zone or the region that they lived in have become unsafe. That must have been a huge shock to residents in Dubai and the Gulf.

Reputation being very safe and stable, completely turned on its head, the reality being turned on its head because suddenly drones are now flying into air spaces hitting infrastructure and buildings. And I remember that there was an exodus of people trying to leave the the area. And that has obviously long-term consequences as well, because it's a global capital with a lot of workforce around the world working in in these areas, also providing global services who are now unwilling to live there or had to shut down operations, causing millions and millions of dollars of damage to well, directly the economy of the UAE, the economy of Saudi and other countries, but also the The cost that we are bearing in Europe Just another example, know, even closer to Europe, Cyprus. Again, earlier this year with the well the the drone attack on RF Akatori, tourism to Cyprus took a massive hit. That's some of my understanding. You know, people just see these incidences across the Middle East, the sort of indiscriminate nature of them, particularly like gave Dubai as a good example.

They don't want to go there for the holidays. So there's a further impact of where you would suspect tourism and satellite countries like Turkey and stuff, Greece. Having a tourism impact because people want to keep away from that part of the world. And then there's one thing that going back a little bit to Ukraine in our times, and I remember this discussion which we were having in a cafe in Kyiv, you and I, about the costs of air defenses. And I think this is the one thing that kind of ties together both the big drones and the small drones is the cost of countering them. If I remember, but also for our listeners, there were all kinds of air defenses that were used.

In in Kiev, one of the the drones that we unfortunately got accustomed to was the Shaheds. The Shahids that we we are reading also on the news these days. It has a very particular noise. It almost sounds like a flying lawnmover or a Vespa. And the ways to counter these have evolved and many times the cost of countering them is huge. And the same thing with the it's even more difficult with the with the small drones and I think this is where gets us to the the next point is who is in charge.

In Ukraine it's it's it's clear because it it's the military who's in charge of of counter or of aerial defense and also counter UAS or counter drone operations. But in Europe and in other countries that are not formally at war, it's it's ever more difficult because it's it's almost like a gap. Many times it's the it's between the police or the army. So the gap is or an airport or a power plant the Authority in charge is the police, not the army. But the police these days rarely have the tools to counter the drones. As we've seen in the Brussels incident, first they go and check the defenses and then they send another set of drones that are more capable.

Germany is a good example. They have taken a decision that the state police are responsible for stopping the drones, and they seen that they often lacked the equipment. So this year in February. Germany changed the law so the army is able and can act against the drones, including shooting them down when civilian authorities ask. And I think this is a very good adaptation to the kind of situation that we are living in. And we've seen that the EU is also putting 400 million euros into drones and counter drone equipment.

But I think this is not where it stops. It's great that we are focusing on the technology aspect and the states in Europe are working on countering these, but I think there's a lot in civilian resilience and that people and citizens are informed what these drones are, what their types are, and how they can be part of defenses as well. Many times a phone call to 112 or 999 can be helping the authorities in reacting fast. Clearly, if military drones cross an airspace, this is a military matter. and a military response will take place and there's complete systems and processes within that. I guess there's a whole conversation and we're not gonna bring it up in this podcast because we're not a defense and security podcast on what assets you use, how do you get cost effectiveness?

Don't fire million dollar missiles at fifty thousand dollar drones, ideally. it has happened, if it's anything you can use. So there's a whole security debate going on about what's the appropriate response and how militaries can be better prepared to respond to these these threats. But that leaves a gray area where these sort of crossovers of civilian drones being weaponized, used for effectively military purposes, the gray zone stuff, which we which we've touched on, Leipzig, very good example. Who's going to defend critical infrastructure, clearly case by case basis, country by country basis? It will it could demand a societal approach if you find this all really, really ramping up.

in in various parts of Europe. the militaries d you know, overstretched and they can't always respond. I think, you know, if you're a member of the public and you you see someone suspiciously taking drones out of the back of a car or something, you know, near the airport fence or they have your infrastructure, that's probably worthy of a phone call to the police these days. Is preventing every incident is unrealistic, of course. Recovering quickly is something governments and operators, however, they can plan for. Informing citizens, or in the case of airports, informing passengers and restoring services fast.

What we think could be a good idea is better detection and have the part where the governments have a clear idea on deciding who to act. So other than seeing it, identifying it. There needs to be, I think the most critical part right now is deciding who acts. And then of course there is the part where acting safely, unlike how you can shoot down these drones. Many times we've seen it while we were living in Kyiv that the falling debris can also be a direct harm to civilians. But before getting to that, deciding who acts is perhaps one of the most important parts, and also something that we we can encourage listeners.

to look into their countries on who is responsible for these kinds of events and how they can be part of the discourse, the political discourse. Our view is that drones over Europe are not a reason to be afraid. They are a reason to understand how this kind of pressure works. It is cheap and hard to trace, and it is built to make us react badly by panicking or by ignoring it. The best answer for citizens is calm attention, know is responsible, ask what they're doing about it. And don't pass on a scare before it has been checked, because many times just it can be a couple of kids who are flying at the wrong time.

Modern conflict doesn't always arrive as an invading army. Sometimes it's a drone that closes an airport, or even more dramatically sets a ship on fire. I think the question for all of us is as societies, can we absorb these shocks and keep working, or does it just completely comatose the situation? So that goes into our awareness, resilience, and what we can do about it. On our website, under the lab part, there is a longer explanation about what governments are doing and what the EU is doing and what kind of solutions there are. So we invite you to check it out on homefrontpod.com and you will see the lab part.

And the article is called Drones Over Europe. And we also ask you to check out our website. There is more, and you can also submit your questions and also sign up. To our signals. And just to add those, if you make it onto these the webpage, please add comment, send us requests of the stuff you would like to listen to, things that simply just raise a conversation. And we look forward to it and and welcome it.

Next time, next episode, it's gonna be about your role, what ordinary people can actually do about hybrid threats. Stay calm, get informed, and carry on, as we closed out in our first episode. So that's all for This episode of Homefront. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next time. Have a great day.