Russia 'highly likely' behind Europe drone campaign, IISS says

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) reported Thursday that the Kremlin orchestrated a sustained surveillance campaign involving 144 separate incidents across Europe between August 2024 and February 2026. Researchers found that unmanned aerial vehicles repeatedly penetrated airspace surrounding nuclear facilities in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, while also disrupting military operations and forcing repeated closures of major commercial airports. The operation represented "a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin and a strategic failure of allied air defense," according to the report.

Shadow fleet and attribution

The IISS assessed it was "highly likely" that Russian intelligence services directed the campaign and "likely" that vessels from Moscow's shadow fleet served as launch and recovery platforms for the drones. "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," the researchers stated. The report noted that European governments had largely examined incidents within their own borders rather than identifying a continent-wide pattern, contributing to delays in attributing responsibility.

Air defense gaps

The study argued that Europe's existing air defense architectures were designed to counter conventional military threats rather than "relatively low-cost UAVs and deniable incursions" intended to remain below the threshold of a collective NATO response. According to the IISS, the campaign aimed to test allied response times, identify vulnerabilities around critical infrastructure, impose economic and psychological costs through aviation disruption, and normalize repeated airspace violations without triggering wider military escalation. The institute warned that initiatives such as the European Drone Defense Initiative remain hampered by fragmented legal authorities, inconsistent detection systems and slow attribution processes.