Russia’s UAV campaign over Europe

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.

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.

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