It started in Copenhagen. Around 8:30 p.m. on a Monday in late September, a few large drones were spotted flying near the airport.
All takeoffs and landings were halted for almost four hours. More than 50 flights were diverted, and over 100 more were canceled.
On the same day, 30 flights were disrupted at Oslo Airport in Norway due to another suspected drone sighting.
In the past few months, several more European cities have seen nearby drones temporarily shut down their airports. It happened twice within 24 hours in Munich in early October. Over 10,000 people have had their travel plans disrupted.
In one sense, this is a nuisance for travelers. However, analysts and political leaders say it’s an example of Russia’s hybrid warfare.
This strategy involves using plausible deniability to undermine a society and can also include disinformation and cyberattacks.
As Blaise Metreweli, the chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, said in her inaugural speech on December 15: “The new frontline is everywhere.”
Drones have also been spotted near air bases, but the impact has been most palpable in Lithuania, the Baltic nation of less than 3 million people, whose eastern border is less than 70 miles as the crow flies from Russia’s westernmost edge.
Over the past 10 weeks, the airport in Vilnius, the capital, has been shut down 15 times. And not due to drones, but balloons smuggling crates of cheap cigarettes over the border from Belarus.
“They are also difficult to detect because they’re not big aircraft or drones,” said Sean Patrick, senior aviation security analyst at Osprey Flight Solutions.
“It is quite clever exploiting this from the Russian side to use these systems, and they’ve pushed Lithuania to declare this emergency.”
Thirteen days before the Scandinavia incidents, around 20 Russian drones flew across the border into Poland. The airspace over four Polish airports was closed while NATO forces scrambled jets, shooting down up to four of the drones.
Poland also invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, which calls for consultation over an urgent situation — its first usage since the start of the Ukraine War in 2022.
Then, a Russia-linked ship was located off the Danish coast during the Copenhagen incident. The French military later boarded the oil tanker, and the captain, a Chinese national, was charged with one count of refusing to follow instructions from the French navy.
“A lot of these ships have changed their names quite recently,” Patrick said. “They’ve got new flags. It makes it very hard to follow who’s doing what, who’s working for who.”
However, at other points, links to Russia have been less clear. Police in Norway closed their investigation into the Oslo incident, saying there wasn’t enough evidence that there were actually any drones.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied the country’s involvement.
In an analyst report earlier this month, Osprey Flight Solutions said: “It remains unconfirmed whether any/all of the … incidents are directly linked.”
“Osprey assesses that some of the drone sightings are likely to be false identifications — i.e. not drones.”
Drones disrupting air travel may be a sign of worse to come
In July 2024, a package exploded in a DHL freight center in Leipzig, Germany. The head of the country’s domestic intelligence service said it was “only a lucky coincidence” that the delayed package caught fire on the ground, rather than during flight.
Similar fires occurred at depots in Poland and the UK. Then, this September, Lithuanian prosecutors charged 15 people with terrorism offences, the BBC reported.
They said the individuals, with links to Russian intelligence, put explosive devices in vibrating massage pillows, which were set off with electronic timers. The parcels were all shipped from Lithuania.
Investigators have also said they believe these were dry runs aimed at sabotaging flights to the US and Canada.
“You can’t see Europe going to war with Russia over some balloons in Lithuania,” Patrick told Business Insider. “And then it’s where do you get to the limit? Does Europe want to find out what the limit is?”
“So that’s the concern,” he added. “If they do blow up a railway or set off an incendiary device on a transatlantic flight, what’s the next step? Do people want to find out that next step?”
The incidents highlight how Europeans face a new reality since the war in Ukraine began in 2022.
Even Dublin Airport — over 1,500 miles from Kyiv — experienced a drone incident. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had arrived in the Irish capital ahead of schedule earlier this month, before the drones were spotted nearby.
Some European leaders have called for building a drone wall — a system of air defenses in the east of the continent to stop drones launched from Russia.
While discussions continue over a peace deal in Ukraine, tensions are likely to remain high.
“Even if the Ukraine war comes to some sort of hold, ceasefire, peace agreement, I think we can expect Russia to continue these,” Patrick said. “They’ve got a taste for it now.”
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