I don't know to what degree this is known to people outside Europe, but has been on the news over here for the last few months:
> drones aren’t just buzzing airports. They’re systematically surveilling military installations—often during sensitive operations
Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
There are plenty of people even inside Europe who downplay these events.
As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Often enough that coincidences with an unexplainable increase of wealth.
Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a problem, shoot them and thank Russia for the free target-practice exercise.
It seems like the danger even bigger than Russia is government incompetence and the system of broken incentives where everyone does everything to appear busy but actually solving the problem.
If there's a drone there, and you don't want it there, the solution is obvious. It's obvious enough to any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun. If nobody's taking out the proverbial shotgun then I have to assume the drones are not an actual problem and merely yet another excuse for busywork.
How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius?
Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).
> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun
It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.
That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
Exactly. Whether those drones are Russian or not the expected course of action is to intercept them, their operators, and launch vehicles. I would say even more so if they are Russian as weakness only encourage more hostile action. So if these vessels is indeed known or highly suspected to be hostile and linked to drones we would expect them to have been intercepted by special forces.
More broadly, the "Russian scare" in Europe is very murky. I have little doubt that it is vastly overblown for domestic purposes. I.e. it serves the EU's agenda of further political integration and involvement in military matters (in which it is normally not or barely).
Try giving Ukraine more drones, maybe that will fix your problem.
>Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
Something like that has happened in the US recently but Americans believed they were alien spacecraft as they tend to do and the whole thing got swallowed up in memes and Reddit threads.
Also apparently the US is ride or die with Putin now so Russia can't have done anything of the sort. Must have been aliens.
I would fear Russian drones a lot less than American or French ones.
[deleted]
Thank you for your service.
Of course the Russians will do this we helped Ukrainians attack the Russian nuclear fleet with drones they are most definitely organising some payback actions.
Be glad stuff isn't exploding yet, we are at war with Russia. Did people expect no damage would happen inside Europe?
Those Russian drone sightings remind me a lot of the "Russian" submarines off the coast of Sweden in the '80s.
Good job! OSINT rules.
And regarding drones, surely any state actor may be doing this, however doing surveillance by drones over military bases is just so noob. That just points out they don't have a capacity to do reconnaissance with satellites, or they are doing something completely different. Probably making sure the target knows someone is watching, saying "We know where you have your sensitive spots".
These young journos are legends.
Neat.
Amazes me that the Russians always seem to have the capacity for this sort of, I can't think of a clean word, let's inadequately say gamesmanship. When I'd have thought they have enough on their plate in Ukraine.
Apparently not. They did just drilled missile launches on Tokyo with the Chinese
A lot of these drone scares remind me of UFO flaps. There was one over London Gatwick not long ago and no one ever managed to photograph the thing as far as I can remember.
I'm sure NATO has drone swarms all over Russian bases right now, but that's the bit they miss. Part of a long tradition of trying out each other's defences.
NATO has satellites and spies. Why would they need to use drones?
Russian OTOH has an aging fleet of spy satellites, and drones serve to intimidate as much as gather intelligence.
This just shows how amateurish the German state apparatus is when it comes to things like this. Maybe they're playing a game one level deeper and show them only what they want the Russians to see or see it as inevitable, I don't know. But I don't have high trust in our defense.
From the article:
---
European intelligence services assess the three documented ships as operating “with high confidence“ on behalf of Russian interests. Their movement profiles are “very conspicuous” and show “little evidence of commercial activity.”
---
...of course they know, but for whatever reason they didn't find a smoking gun so far (e.g. drones on the ships or drones taking off/landing) - or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.
> Official inspections were “symbolic”—not all containers opened
...this might to be the core of the problem.
> or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.
Yes agree. There is no incentive that intelligence services would communicate their findings, in fact it's the opposite lol
Of course European countries' intelligence and military know about this.
The question we should ask ourselves is why they let it happen... My take is that the "Russian scare" serves the EU's agenda. You'll notice how European leaders and the EU are stroking fear at every opportunity.
Eh, no matter what is done about the drones there would be people who complain about 'fear- and war-mongering', and most likely it would be the exact same people who now complain that the government is 'letting this happen' ;)
Imagine the German military would shoot those drones down over Germany, the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'. There are clear and very restrictive rules what the military and police are allowed and not allowed to do in cilivized countries, and those restrictions are in general a good thing and shouldn't be changed on a whim.
> the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'.
They have a right to protest and the government is free to ignore them and do its job. This is not a serious argument and the kip about "civilized countries" is ridiculous, frankly.
Drones don't fly from Russia. They are launched more locally. The vessels mentioned in this article could be taken over by special forces today if the neighbouring governments decided to. So again why don't they? I can't find any sensible answer to that apart from "because they are useful".
I don't read every news source internationally however I always wonder just how often UK, German, US linked vessels, drones, etc are found within close proximity of Russia/China/Iran and how often they get reported.
If the same thing would happen to Russia you can be sure that Medvedev and Peskov would whine about it for months, including the occasional nuclear annihilation threat towards the 'collective West'.
[deleted]
Authoritarian regimes don’t act aggressively because they’re provoked; they act aggressively because projecting power and testing limits is part of how they survive internally. History is full of cases where no meaningful provocation existed at all.
Nazi Germany didn’t need Allied ships near its coast to invade Poland. Saddam Hussein didn’t need US aircraft nearby to invade Kuwait. Argentina didn’t need British naval pressure to seize the Falklands. Russia didn’t need NATO forces near Kyiv to annex Crimea in 2014 or launch a full invasion in 2022.
Tyrannies tend to frame any foreign presence as “provocation” after the fact, because it’s politically useful at home. Liberal democracies publish their movements precisely because they operate under scrutiny; authoritarian states act first and justify later.
Proximity makes for a convenient narrative, not a causal explanation.
There is a massive anti-western infiltration operation being driven by Russia and it's allies, like Iran, Qatar and China. The biggest tragedy of the Russia-Russia hoax of Trumps first term is that people have become numb to something which was not really happening, but now is happening at an unprecedented scale.
I can only really speak for the media in Norway, but they spend almost no time covering this anymore and instead just print partisan American political things as if we are the 51st state and also a deep blue state. The media in Western Europe needs to stop acting like this, and start focusing on Europe and our challenges.
Just another example of the total insanity of Western Europe is that there is some expectation that USA will defend Europe when the majority of people in almost every single western European country has no interest in defending themselves. People expect US to send troops when there is no political support in any western European country to send troops. I love Europe, it's my home, but that is also why I don't think it's helpful to ignore the truth. Europe is the sick and dying man of the world. We need to turn this around.
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I don't know, the solution to that seems fairly simple, no?
I don't know to what degree this is known to people outside Europe, but has been on the news over here for the last few months:
> drones aren’t just buzzing airports. They’re systematically surveilling military installations—often during sensitive operations
Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
There are plenty of people even inside Europe who downplay these events.
As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Often enough that coincidences with an unexplainable increase of wealth.
Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a problem, shoot them and thank Russia for the free target-practice exercise.
It seems like the danger even bigger than Russia is government incompetence and the system of broken incentives where everyone does everything to appear busy but actually solving the problem.
If there's a drone there, and you don't want it there, the solution is obvious. It's obvious enough to any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun. If nobody's taking out the proverbial shotgun then I have to assume the drones are not an actual problem and merely yet another excuse for busywork.
How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius?
In reality it's a bit more complicated, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-a...
Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).
> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun
It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.
That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
Exactly. Whether those drones are Russian or not the expected course of action is to intercept them, their operators, and launch vehicles. I would say even more so if they are Russian as weakness only encourage more hostile action. So if these vessels is indeed known or highly suspected to be hostile and linked to drones we would expect them to have been intercepted by special forces.
More broadly, the "Russian scare" in Europe is very murky. I have little doubt that it is vastly overblown for domestic purposes. I.e. it serves the EU's agenda of further political integration and involvement in military matters (in which it is normally not or barely).
Try giving Ukraine more drones, maybe that will fix your problem.
>Now, if you live in the US or anywhere else outside Europe - please pause for a moment and see how it makes you feel to imagine having Russian drones hover over your military installations regularly, or other important places of your public infrastructure.
Something like that has happened in the US recently but Americans believed they were alien spacecraft as they tend to do and the whole thing got swallowed up in memes and Reddit threads.
Also apparently the US is ride or die with Putin now so Russia can't have done anything of the sort. Must have been aliens.
I would fear Russian drones a lot less than American or French ones.
Thank you for your service.
Of course the Russians will do this we helped Ukrainians attack the Russian nuclear fleet with drones they are most definitely organising some payback actions.
Be glad stuff isn't exploding yet, we are at war with Russia. Did people expect no damage would happen inside Europe?
Those Russian drone sightings remind me a lot of the "Russian" submarines off the coast of Sweden in the '80s.
Hint:
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Sweden-Submarine/d...
Good job! OSINT rules. And regarding drones, surely any state actor may be doing this, however doing surveillance by drones over military bases is just so noob. That just points out they don't have a capacity to do reconnaissance with satellites, or they are doing something completely different. Probably making sure the target knows someone is watching, saying "We know where you have your sensitive spots".
These young journos are legends.
Neat.
Amazes me that the Russians always seem to have the capacity for this sort of, I can't think of a clean word, let's inadequately say gamesmanship. When I'd have thought they have enough on their plate in Ukraine.
Apparently not. They did just drilled missile launches on Tokyo with the Chinese
https://nitter.net/avivector/status/1998516670399152245#m
A lot of these drone scares remind me of UFO flaps. There was one over London Gatwick not long ago and no one ever managed to photograph the thing as far as I can remember.
I'm sure NATO has drone swarms all over Russian bases right now, but that's the bit they miss. Part of a long tradition of trying out each other's defences.
NATO has satellites and spies. Why would they need to use drones?
Russian OTOH has an aging fleet of spy satellites, and drones serve to intimidate as much as gather intelligence.
This just shows how amateurish the German state apparatus is when it comes to things like this. Maybe they're playing a game one level deeper and show them only what they want the Russians to see or see it as inevitable, I don't know. But I don't have high trust in our defense.
From the article:
---
European intelligence services assess the three documented ships as operating “with high confidence“ on behalf of Russian interests. Their movement profiles are “very conspicuous” and show “little evidence of commercial activity.”
---
...of course they know, but for whatever reason they didn't find a smoking gun so far (e.g. drones on the ships or drones taking off/landing) - or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.
> Official inspections were “symbolic”—not all containers opened
...this might to be the core of the problem.
> or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.
Yes agree. There is no incentive that intelligence services would communicate their findings, in fact it's the opposite lol
Of course European countries' intelligence and military know about this.
The question we should ask ourselves is why they let it happen... My take is that the "Russian scare" serves the EU's agenda. You'll notice how European leaders and the EU are stroking fear at every opportunity.
Eh, no matter what is done about the drones there would be people who complain about 'fear- and war-mongering', and most likely it would be the exact same people who now complain that the government is 'letting this happen' ;)
Imagine the German military would shoot those drones down over Germany, the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'. There are clear and very restrictive rules what the military and police are allowed and not allowed to do in cilivized countries, and those restrictions are in general a good thing and shouldn't be changed on a whim.
> the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'.
They have a right to protest and the government is free to ignore them and do its job. This is not a serious argument and the kip about "civilized countries" is ridiculous, frankly.
Drones don't fly from Russia. They are launched more locally. The vessels mentioned in this article could be taken over by special forces today if the neighbouring governments decided to. So again why don't they? I can't find any sensible answer to that apart from "because they are useful".
I don't read every news source internationally however I always wonder just how often UK, German, US linked vessels, drones, etc are found within close proximity of Russia/China/Iran and how often they get reported.
If the same thing would happen to Russia you can be sure that Medvedev and Peskov would whine about it for months, including the occasional nuclear annihilation threat towards the 'collective West'.
Authoritarian regimes don’t act aggressively because they’re provoked; they act aggressively because projecting power and testing limits is part of how they survive internally. History is full of cases where no meaningful provocation existed at all.
Nazi Germany didn’t need Allied ships near its coast to invade Poland. Saddam Hussein didn’t need US aircraft nearby to invade Kuwait. Argentina didn’t need British naval pressure to seize the Falklands. Russia didn’t need NATO forces near Kyiv to annex Crimea in 2014 or launch a full invasion in 2022.
Tyrannies tend to frame any foreign presence as “provocation” after the fact, because it’s politically useful at home. Liberal democracies publish their movements precisely because they operate under scrutiny; authoritarian states act first and justify later.
Proximity makes for a convenient narrative, not a causal explanation.
There is a massive anti-western infiltration operation being driven by Russia and it's allies, like Iran, Qatar and China. The biggest tragedy of the Russia-Russia hoax of Trumps first term is that people have become numb to something which was not really happening, but now is happening at an unprecedented scale.
I can only really speak for the media in Norway, but they spend almost no time covering this anymore and instead just print partisan American political things as if we are the 51st state and also a deep blue state. The media in Western Europe needs to stop acting like this, and start focusing on Europe and our challenges.
Just another example of the total insanity of Western Europe is that there is some expectation that USA will defend Europe when the majority of people in almost every single western European country has no interest in defending themselves. People expect US to send troops when there is no political support in any western European country to send troops. I love Europe, it's my home, but that is also why I don't think it's helpful to ignore the truth. Europe is the sick and dying man of the world. We need to turn this around.
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[flagged]
I don't know, the solution to that seems fairly simple, no?
Russia withdraws to pre-2014 borders.
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