Russia’s UAV campaign over Europe

The drone is the last link in the chain.

The vessel is the first.
IISS published a report last week assessing that the Kremlin ran a coordinated UAV campaign over Europe between 2024 and 2026, and that shadow fleet vessels were likely used as launch and recovery platforms in international waters.

 

From IISS by Charlie Edwards, Red Fox O'Loughlin & Louis Bearn

 
Russia’s UAV campaign over Europe, likely enabled by shadow-fleet vessels operating in international waters, exposed critical gaps in allied air defences, legal authority and political cohesion, revealing that the threshold for collective response is higher than European deterrence has assumed. 

Between August 2024 and February 2026, Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were flown in the airspace of a dozen NATO member states and Ireland, forcing repeated closures of major commercial aviation hubs, disrupting military operations and penetrating the perimeters of some of Europe’s most sensitive defence installations – among them nuclear-sharing sites hosting American B61-12 gravity bombs and France’s ballistic-missile submarine base at Île Longue.

This report assesses it is highly likely that the Kremlin conducted a UAV campaign over Europe.
We assess it is likely that Russian-linked vessels and the ‘shadow fleet’ were used as launch/recovery platforms for UAVs as part of the Kremlin’s wider unconventional war on Europe.
The UAV campaign (largely in the latter part of 2025) operated with substantial impunity across European airspace – representing both a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin and a strategic failure of allied air defence.
The Kremlin’s success rests on a basic strategic insight: Europe’s air-defence architecture was designed to detect and defeat conventional air threats operating in a recognisable battlespace.
It was not built for, by comparison, relatively low-cost UAVs and deniable incursions with the aim of exposing gaps in detection, decision-making and legal authority – all while remaining below the threshold of a collective allied response.

 
One finding stands out.
Europe's flagship counter-drone initiative only has a mandate over the drone once it enters European airspace.

Nobody owns the vessel that launched it.
That is the gap maritime intelligence exists to close.
A shadow fleet vessel does not appear out of nowhere.

It loiters.
It goes dark.
It deviates from its commercial baseline.

It positions itself near infrastructure or under flight corridors days before anything flies.

These are detectable behaviours, and they are detectable before launch, not after.
Counter-UAV starts at sea.
If you wait until radar picks up the drone, you have already lost the initiative.
Read the IISS report.
Then ask who is watching the vessels.

 

Our argument is not that every reported sighting was Russian-directed, or that every reported sighting involved a UAV, but that the aggregate pattern of UAV sightings cannot be adequately explained by misidentification, hobbyist activity or opportunistic harassment alone.
Attribution remains a key challenge for European governments, and none have, to date, publicly attributed a UAV sighting to Russia or gone as far as to describe a coordinated Russian UAV campaign over Western and Northern Europe.
One reason, European officials have suggested to us as part of our research, is that the relevant governments focused on the national response rather than connecting the dots across Europe.

Open-source reporting of each incident in the IISS dataset suggests the Kremlin’s campaign exposed political fractures within the Alliance, as well as exploiting the gap between what European militaries could do and what their governments were prepared to authorise.
And the campaign demonstrated, repeatedly and in public, that the threshold for collective punishment was higher than European deterrence postures have previously assumed.

The campaign likely had a number of aims, including:

• probing the response times and decision-making thresholds of allied air defence and civil-military command structures; mapping vulnerabilities around critical infrastructure, including dual-use civilian hubs, military logistics nodes supporting Ukraine, and facilities associated with allied nuclear deterrence;
• imposing economic and psychological costs on European societies through the disruption of civilian aviation and public confidence in airspace security; and
• normalising low-level airspace violations below the threshold of a direct allied military response.

Our key judgement is that Europe’s current counter-UAV architecture does not yet match the threat despite NATO, the European Union and national governments focusing more attention on the issue: detection is uneven, legal authorities are fragmented, response options are often disproportionate and attribution remains too slow to support timely deterrence.

The Kremlin’s tactical successes in exploiting European air-defence vulnerabilities also revealed the limits of Russia’s intelligence-collection options.
The Kremlin has been forced to find a series of workarounds since large numbers of Russian intelligence officers were expelled from European capitals in 2022, reducing the Kremlin’s intelligence infrastructure in Europe.
The UAV campaign also exposed gaps in Russia’s Earth imaging and reconnaissance capacity, especially when Russia’s UAV Campaign Over Europe 5 compared with the combined military and commercial space support available to Ukraine and NATO states.

Europe’s most ambitious collective response, the European Drone Defence Initiative (EDDI), aims to build a continent-wide, 360-degree counter-drone architecture, with initial operational capability by the end of 2026.
Yet the European Parliament concluded in January 2026 that the EDDI lacked the agility and doctrinal coherence required to deliver scalable results.
Critically, even a fully operational EDDI will only target the UAV once it enters European airspace – there is no mandate over the vessel that launched it.

Optimal Transit unveils self-powered vessel-based AI data centre

Optimal Transit Unveils Kraaken™: The World’s First Self-Powered Maritime AI Infrastructure Platform with CAPEX & OPEX Costs at a Fraction of Conventional Land-Based Facilities.

From SmartMaritimeNetwork by Rob O'Dwyer

Optimal Transit has unveiled Kraaken, a family of standardised self-powered maritime AI data centre platforms engineered to eliminate dependence on land, the electrical grid, freshwater cooling and conventional fuel.

Kraaken generates its own continuous electrical power by combining the thermal energy naturally stored in the ocean with waste heat produced by the data centre itself.
Through the company’s multi-stage Digital Ocean Thermal (DOT) engine, waste heat that would otherwise be rejected is transformed into an energy source.
This is combined with cold ocean water for cooling.

The system is designed for continuous operation 365 days per year in marine environments ranging from equatorial waters to Arctic regions without requiring conventional fuel deliveries.

The platforms are built upon Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull (SWATH) vessel technology to provide stability for hyperscale computing while supporting continuous high-bandwidth optical and satellite communications.
The modular platforms can operate either permanently moored offshore or independently at sea.

If severe weather threatens, a platform can disconnect from its mooring and relocate under its own propulsion at speeds approaching 30 kilometres per hour.

“Artificial intelligence is creating unprecedented demand for power, water and land,” said Scott Myers, President of Optimal Transit.

 

Optimal Transit’s Patented Digital Ocean Thermal (DOT) Engine Technology Uses COTS Components to Generate 100MW of Continuous 365-day/24-hour Electricity

 

“Kraaken takes a fundamentally different approach by moving data centre infrastructure offshore and using proven marine engineering together with our patented Digital Ocean Thermal technology to produce continuous electrical power.”

“Our innovation is not dependent on new scientific breakthroughs – it’s built on integrating commercially proven technologies into a standardised platform.”

Optimal Transit estimates that the infrastructure cost of a standardised 100 MW Kraaken platform, excluding computing hardware, is less than US$500 million, with projected annual operating expenses of US$10 million to US$20 million.

The product family is designed around standardised modular platforms optimised for different computing missions.
The 10/20 MW Kraaken is a 76.2-metre, 10,160-ton vessel configured for edge computing, cloud applications and regional AI processing.
The flagship 50/100 MW Kraaken is a 91.4-metre, 50,802-ton vessel optimised for hyperscale AI training and large language model applications.

Over the next nine months, proceeds from the company’s ongoing Series A financing are expected to fund the completion of American Bureau of Shipping (ABS)-ready engineering drawings for the 20 MW and 100 MW platforms, together with digital twin validation of the DOT engine.

Subject to the completion of a planned Series B financing in 2027, the company intends to establish standardised production capable of delivering up to 20 Kraaken 100 MW platforms annually through shipyards worldwide, with each platform representing approximately US$400 million in infrastructure value.

Beneath the seas: the adventure of marine cartography

 

 The Brest harbor and its surroundings in 1820, with numerous measurements taken one by one to determine the depth at each point. | SHOM

 

From Ouest France by Angellina Thieblemont

“Some Maps Remain ‘Classified’”: 

The History of Nautical Charts Told at the Brest Naval Museum

The exhibition at the Brest Naval Museum, “Beneath the Seas: The Adventure of Marine Cartography,” opens on June 26.

It traces the evolution of this practice over the past 500 years, as well as its military, archaeological, and economic uses—aspects largely unknown to the general public.

Stories of shipwrecks lost in Brest Harbor (Finistère), British blockades of the port, and maps classified as “defense secrets”… 

All these stories have one thing in common: they chronicle the development of underwater cartography in the new major exhibition at the Brest Naval Museum (Finistère), which opens on June 26, 2026.

 

Brest, home to the world’s oldest underwater mapping service

To mark the 400th anniversary of the French Navy, an exhibition on “The Call of the Deep” is being held in Paris, Toulon, Port-Louis, Rochefort, and Brest.

Each location of the National Maritime Museum explores a different aspect of this exploration of the ocean depths.

In Brest, the focus is on the history of marine cartography, from the 16th century to the present day. 

It is no coincidence that this theme was assigned to the “City of the Ponant”: since 1971, Brest’s Bergot district has been home to the Navy’s Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service (SHOM).

Founded in 1720, it is the oldest marine mapping service in the world.

 

A rare document depicting the Crozon Peninsula, Pointe Saint-Mathieu, and the Brest harbor, known as “Baye de Breft.” | NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM

In two rooms, shielded from the heat wave by the fort’s thick walls, the exhibition explains why and how nautical charts have been made since the 16th century. Among the hundred or so works on display are period maps featuring drawings of the monsters believed to lurk beneath the sea’s surface, as well as parchments, paintings, models, and a full-scale replica of a chart room complete with period tools…

Visitors also learn about the story of Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, the father of modern hydrography. In the 19th century, this pioneer set out to survey the coast of Brest. It was one of the first seabeds in the world to be mapped. On one of his maps, thousands of numbers are scattered across a drawing of the harbor. They give a sense of the titanic undertaking: for each point, a rope with a lead weight was lowered from their small boat and used as a sounding line.

 

A map of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, 1537. This map was painted on parchment by Vesconte de Maggiolo (1457–1530). | NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM

Deliberately Falsifying Maps

The exhibition features several thematic sections, highlighting the many fields in which hydrography is useful, particularly in archaeology and the installation of internet cables.

Brest. Me, the mayor...

But since the 16th century, this science has been most widely used in the field of defense: mapping sandbars to avoid running aground during battles, creating false maps that omit hazards to trap opponents… 

Such was the case with the Rocher de la Rose, an obstacle that loomed at the entrance to the Penfeld channel until the 19th century and was blown up by divers. 

It was deliberately omitted from maps in order to cause enemy ships to run aground. 

Visitors can also view one of the maps of the Normandy beaches that was used to prepare for the 1944 D-Day landings.

 

 

The 1842 painting *Combat du Grand Port* depicts a battle in which a British ship is defeated and runs aground on sandbars, while the French ships—which benefit from highly accurate nautical charts—escape unscathed. | NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM/A. FUX

 

Only 26% of the ocean floor will be mapped by 2026

Today, some maps are classified as defense secrets because of their quality and accuracy. 

“Accuracy is a weapon,” explains Jean-Yves Besselièvre, director of the National Maritime Museum. Since the 16th century, only 26% of the planet’s ocean floor has been mapped. 

“We’ve mapped the surface of the moon better than we’ve mapped the ocean depths,” says Jean-Yves Besselièvre.
Titled “Beneath the Seas: The Adventure of Underwater Cartography,” the exhibition runs through March 2027. 

A family guidebook has been created for children.

It allows them to explore the exhibition in a fun way by inviting them to conduct a mini-investigation.

The wildest shoot of my career (Benjamin Hardman)

Here are a couple of unseen angles from the moment I witnessed a Polar Bear attempting to hunt a Beluga whale pod in the Arctic pack ice, located in the marginal ice zone between Svalbard and Greenland.

This whole moment unfolded so quickly and revealed the sheer intensity that can arise out of nowhere in these otherwise very calm and desolate sea ice landscapes.

Collapse of AMOC ocean current may already be locked in

A visualisation of Atlantic Ocean currents based on sea surface temperature dataNASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

From New Scientist by Chris Simms

 

The fate of the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe’s climate warm depends on our carbon emissions and the rate of ice melt from Greenland, but there is a chance that a shutdown is already inevitable

 

 A potentially catastrophic collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents that control Europe’s climate may already be inevitable.
Based on model simulations, researchers estimate that there is a 10 to 23 per cent chance that such a collapse is locked in.

“There is a significant probability that we’re already committed to collapse, and we can’t change that even now,” says Phil Holden at the Open University, UK.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) carries warm, salty water from the tropics into the North Atlantic Ocean, where it cools, sinks and then returns south.
This circulation regulates the climate across Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Recently, there have been signs that this vital current system is weakening, including by slowing in some areas, partly because the melting of the Greenland ice sheet caused by climate change is making the salty water less dense, so that it sinks more slowly.

Some scientists have suggested that the AMOC could collapse, plunging Europe into near-Arctic conditions and weakening monsoon systems around the world.
One recent study found the AMOC could cross a tipping point within decades, but it is difficult to say how likely this is.

“The AMOC collapse has just been so intangible,” says Holden.
“So far there’s been no firm quantification of whether it is going to happen or when it is going to happen.”

“There’s a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of different opinions among the expert scientific community,” says Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, UK.

To get a better idea of what might happen to AMOC, Holden, Lenton and their colleagues ran 21 computer simulations with varying rates of Greenland ice melt and emissions peaking at different dates, at 10-year intervals from 2005 through to 2135.
The team assumed that, after the peak, greenhouse gas emissions would fall to net zero over 35 years while the melt rate of Greenland ice would stay constant.
Each simulation ran for a total of 300 years.

The models indicate that under very conservative assumptions – emissions peaking in 2025 and the Greenland ice sheet adding just 54 millimetres to sea-level rise by 2100 – there is a 10 per cent chance that the collapse of the AMOC is already inevitable.
The researchers defined this as when the circulation would only occur at lower latitudes, and when the overturning current that brings heat to the high latitudes has stopped.

If we don’t start on the path to net zero until 2100, the probability of collapse rises to 80 per cent, the model predicts.

Under less conservative assumptions, with melting ice from Greenland adding 274 mm to sea-level rise, as is projected by 2100, the probability that we are already committed to collapse is 23 per cent.

Even when a collapse becomes inevitable, it would take a long time to happen.
In the simulations, the average delay between the year in which the world becomes committed to collapse and the collapse coming to pass was 84 years, with the earliest collapse occurring around 2060.

“This idea of talking about committed collapse, rather than when the collapse actually happens, frames it in a way that’s quite interesting for risk management,” says Till Wagnerat the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he is cautious about extrapolating to the real world.
“I think there’s fairly good evidence that there’s going to be a weakening, but the actual larger-scale dynamical outcome is still very much up in the air.”

Jonathan Baker at the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, says the simulations provide a valuable way to explore how the AMOC responds to different scenarios, but the low resolution of the model used means it isn’t as sensitive as some other climate models, which might influence its estimates of risk.

Many state-of-the-art climate simulations can compute the globe in grids of 1° of latitude and longitude, which takes huge amounts of computational resources and time to run long-term simulations.
The model used in this study uses 5° grids, but this low resolution was a deliberate choice, says Lenton.

“There isn’t the compute power, or no one’s had the ability to do this exercise with a higher-resolution model,” he says.
This does mean the probabilities of the risk estimates could be different at higher resolution, he says, but recent research on the AMOC using a higher-resolution model indicates that, if anything, this might raise rather than lower the estimates.

“Further work using multiple climate models and comparison with the wider body of evidence will be important before drawing reliable conclusions about the magnitude of future AMOC collapse risk,” says Baker.

If there is a chance the world is already committed to AMOC collapse, as the model suggests, this should provide extra incentive to cut emissions, says Lenton.
This is because the model indicates that the probability of AMOC collapse rises sharply if net zero is delayed.
If emissions continue unabated for 10 extra years beyond the point of commitment, the actual collapse would happen faster – after 57 years, on average, rather than 84.

“What the model is saying to me is ‘let’s do everything in our power to get to net zero as quickly as possible to try to keep this probability down at the 10 per cent level’,” says Lenton.

This chimes with research published last month hinting that the slowdown of the AMOC may be reversible – if carbon dioxide emissions come down enough.

Links :

• EarthArXiv, DOI: 10.31223/X5N48Q
• Arctic Today : AMOC collapse may already be locked in, new study suggests