MANAMA: A new report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) assesses that it is highly likely that Russia conducted a sustained UAV campaign across Europe that penetrated the airspace of some of the continent’s most sensitive military installations. This included nuclear-sharing sites and France’s ballistic missile submarine base, while acting with effective impunity for over 15 months.
The report, Russia’s UAV Campaign over Europe, documents a pattern of 144 incidents between August 2024 and February 2026 across 13 European countries. It concludes that the campaign represents ‘a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin and a strategic failure of allied air defence in Europe’.
The report assesses it likely that Russian-linked commercial vessels, including shadow-fleet tankers, coastal freighters and smaller craft, served as mobile launch platforms for UAVs operating near European ports, airports, energy infrastructure and military facilities. A number of incidents in Germany, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands appear to be linked to launches from Russian-linked maritime vessels.
The report’s most significant finding concerns the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. In February 2026, the Swedish military assessed that a UAV jammed near the carrier was of Russian origin and had been launched from the Russian spy ship Zhigulevsk, confirming that maritime UAV launch is not theoretical but an operational reality already being deployed against allied assets.
Despite the scale of the campaign, no European government has publicly attributed a UAV sighting to Russia or described a coordinated Russian UAV campaign over Western and Northern Europe. Officials privately acknowledge that they believe Russia is responsible, but – as the report notes – governments have tended to focus on their national responses rather than connecting incidents across the continent. The result was that a 15-month campaign proceeded without a collective allied response.
The report identifies a visible gap between what European militaries were capable of doing and what their governments were prepared to authorise. Legal frameworks governing UAV interception are fragmented, while response options are either economically unsustainable or unable to address threats from the maritime domain.
Europe’s most ambitious collective response, the European Drone Defence Initiative (EDDI), aims to build a continent-wide counter-drone architecture with initial operational capability by the end of 2026. Yet the European Parliament concluded in January 2026 that EDDI lacked the ‘agility and doctrinal coherence’ required to deliver scalable results. Critically, even a fully operational EDDI would only target a UAV once it enters European airspace and there is no mandate over the vessel that launched it.
The Russian campaign imposed tangible costs on European societies. Repeated closures of aviation hubs including Brussels, Copenhagen, Munich, Oslo and Vilnius disrupted civilian travel and eroded public confidence in airspace security. Meanwhile, the most sensitive military sites on the continent were repeatedly overflown.
Based on open-source data cross-referenced against news reporting and ACLED data (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), with incidents assessed as hobbyist activity or Ukrainian-war spillover removed, the report identifies the following patterns:
Germany recorded the largest number of incidents (58), including six separate unexplained incidents of ‘possible spy drones’ over Ramstein Air Base and concurrent incidents over Bundeswehr facilities at Manching Air Base and Neuburg an der Donau. Other countries affected include Belgium (25), Denmark (16), the Netherlands (9), France (8), the United Kingdom and Norway (7 each).
Kleine-Brogel air base in northeast Belgium, which houses US nuclear weapons, experienced a severe series of incursions in early November 2024; Sophisticated UAVs were observed over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Fairford and RAF Feltwell in the United Kingdom; Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands – another NATO nuclear-sharing site – was targeted on at least three separate days between November and December 2025, in what the report describes as a deliberate effort to evaluate NATO’s integrated air defence protocols; UAVs were detected over the French Navy’s Île Longue nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine base in Brittany in December 2025; and UAVs described as large, hugely expensive and of military specification flew above an Irish Navy ship off Dublin on the day of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first state visit to Ireland in December 2025.
The report places the campaign in a wider strategic context. The mass expulsion of Russian intelligence officers from European capitals following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine severely degraded the Kremlin’s human intelligence infrastructure on the continent. The UAV campaign represents, in part, a technological workaround: substituting airborne reconnaissance for the networks and capabilities Russia had lost.
The Kremlin’s success, the report argues, rests on a basic strategic insight: Europe’s air-defence architecture was designed for conventional, high-altitude threats. It was not built for low-cost UAVs making deniable incursions below the threshold of a collective allied response.
‘As long as Russian-linked vessels and its shadow fleet can loiter in international waters or European exclusive economic zones and launch UAVs with effective impunity, the campaign’s primary enabling mechanism remains intact,’ the report concludes.
“The pattern of sightings across 15 months and 13 countries cannot be explained by misidentification or opportunism alone. Russia has demonstrated, repeatedly and in public, that it can penetrate the airspace of NATO member states – including over nuclear sites – without triggering a collective allied response. That gap between capability and political will is now a strategic vulnerability,” Charlie Edwards, IISS Senior Fellow for Strategy and National Security, said.
