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.