Drones over Europe.

A drone is simply an aircraft with nobody on board. It is flown by remote control, or it follows a route programmed in advance.

Officials call them UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) or UAS (unmanned aircraft systems). The category is huge. At one end are hobby quadcopters with four rotors and a camera, weighing a few hundred grams and sold online. At the other are military aircraft with wingspans of several metres that can fly hundreds of kilometres. Cheap drones have spread everywhere, and the war in Ukraine has sped up drone technology on all sides.¹

The drones that closed European airports in 2025 were not all toys. Copenhagen's police described two or three large drones, flown by "an actor who has the capabilities, the will, and the tools to show off in this way."² But Germany's chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in October 2025 that none of the drones seen over Germany so far had been armed. All of them, he said, were reconnaissance flights.³

Why does a small drone near an airport matter at all? Because a collision is a real risk. A US government-funded study in 2017 found that a drone does more damage to an aircraft than a bird of the same weight.⁴ That is why air traffic controllers stop flights first and ask questions later.

There are three reasons. The numbers really have gone up. The closures are impossible to miss. And political leaders chose to call them attacks.

The numbers. Euronews' fact-checking team reviewed public reports from more than 24 airports in 12 countries and found that drone disruptions roughly quadrupled between January 2024 and November 2025.¹² National figures point the same way, and in Berlin the rise has not stopped.¹³

The closures got longer. In December 2024, a drone at Copenhagen caused a ten-minute pause with no cancellations. In September 2025, the same airport shut for nearly four hours, with more than 100 flights cancelled.¹² A cut cable under the sea is invisible. A closed airport is on every departures board and in every stranded traveller's social media feed.

How a closure happens. Usually someone reports a drone: a pilot, a controller, a guard or a member of the public. The authorities then decide, with air traffic control, whether to stop flights. At Munich in May 2026, two pilots reported a possible drone; police said security authorities closed the runways "in coordination with German air traffic control". Flights resumed about an hour later, and no threat was found.¹⁴ Nobody can tell at once what the object is or who is flying it, so caution wins. That caution is exactly what makes drones such an effective nuisance.

The politics. Leaders in Denmark, Germany and Belgium didn't describe these as nuisances. They called them attacks, spying or hybrid warfare. That turned airport delays into national security stories.

This is the hardest question, and the one where care matters most. The strongest public assessment points to Russia. Russia denies it. And very few individual drones have been traced to whoever flew them.

Why it's so hard to prove. A drone pilot can be several kilometres away, in a car, on a rooftop or on a ship offshore. The drone can leave before police arrive, and if it is never recovered there is nothing to examine. Without clear attribution, there is no clear response.

The case for Russia. The IISS judged it "highly likely" that Russia ran a coordinated campaign, and that ships of the "shadow fleet" were used as launch platforms.¹⁵ The shadow fleet is a set of old tankers with murky ownership and flags of convenience, used to move Russian oil around sanctions. Ships are useful for this because they can wait in international waters near a coast without crossing anyone's border.

The case for caution. The evidence is mostly circumstantial: patterns, timing and ship-tracking data rather than a recovered drone tied to a named ship. A UK defence police inquiry found no conclusive link to Russia for the sightings it examined, and Denmark's Defence Command did not link its sightings to Russia either.¹⁹ The monitoring group Dronewatch Europe says the IISS report does not present physical evidence linking any specific drone to any specific vessel. An Oxford researcher, Dr David Bacci, warns that "it's not that easy to retrace everything to Russia": some operators may be sympathisers, amateurs or copycats.²⁰

False alarms are real too. On 1 October 2026, Denmark's military admitted that during the 2025 scare, soldiers at the Borris training camp "may have fired into the air while a civilian aircraft passed by." It still says drones were seen at the camp on three nights in September 2025, and who sent them is still unknown.²¹

Two recent cases, one on the EU's own coastline and one far beyond it, show where this can lead when drones and missiles are used in open conflict. They are not the same as the airport sightings. They are a picture of what civilian infrastructure faces when the dial is turned up.

The common thread is reach: cheap, long-range weapons can now threaten infrastructure far from any front line. Food, fuel and parts reach Europe by sea and by air. A strike hundreds of kilometres away can show up as a higher insurance premium, a delayed delivery or a cancelled connection.

The response has three parts: new powers to act, more money for detection and counter-drone equipment, and tighter rules for ordinary owners. It is uneven from country to country, and much of it is still being built.

After Leipzig, Germany said it would expand the federal police's anti-drone unit.³⁰ Analysts say what is still missing is a clear, consistent way for police to deal with drones over critical sites, and a shared European picture of incidents so coordinated operations can be spotted.¹ The IISS puts it simply: a credible response "requires legal clarity."¹⁵

One change deserves attention in its own right. In a country like Germany, letting the army act at home is a big step, taken carefully for good historical reasons. So is detecting drones through phone networks. Neither is a reason for alarm. Both are reasonable things for citizens to ask about.