Russia is highly likely to have conducted a sustained drone campaign across Europe that penetrated the airspace of some of the continent’s most sensitive military installations, including NATO nuclear-sharing sites and France’s ballistic missile submarine base, while acting with effective impunity for over 15 months, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The report, Russia’s UAV Campaign over Europe, documents a pattern of 144 incidents between August 2024 and February 2026 across 13 European countries. It concludes that the campaign represents “a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin and a strategic failure of allied air defence in Europe.”
The institute assesses it likely that Russian-linked commercial vessels, including shadow-fleet tankers, coastal freighters and smaller craft, served as mobile launch platforms for drones operating near European ports, airports, energy infrastructure and military facilities, with incidents in Germany, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands appearing linked to launches from such vessels. The report’s most significant finding concerns the French carrier Charles de Gaulle: in February 2026, the Swedish military assessed that a drone jammed near the carrier was of Russian origin and had been launched from the Russian spy ship Zhigulevsk, which the report says confirms maritime drone launch as an operational reality rather than a theoretical risk.
The dataset is built on open-source information cross-referenced against news reporting and ACLED conflict data, with incidents assessed as hobbyist activity or spillover from the war in Ukraine removed. Of the sightings, 48 per cent occurred over military facilities, 18 per cent over civilian airports, many of which were forced to close, and 26 per cent over critical infrastructure including ports, energy installations and industrial sites. It should be noted, however, that some drone industry experts maintain that a number of reported sightings of this kind are likely to be misidentifications, as most individual incidents have not been independently verified, a limitation inherent to open-source datasets of this nature.
Germany recorded the largest number of incidents at 58, including six unexplained incidents of possible spy drones over Ramstein Air Base, followed by Belgium with 25, Denmark with 16, the Netherlands with nine, France with eight, and the United Kingdom and Norway with seven each. In the UK, the report says sophisticated drones were observed over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall, RAF Fairford and RAF Feltwell. Again, it should be noted, the presence of a drone at a number of these incidents is hotly disputed, with many now generateing evidence pointing the other way.
Other claimed incidents highlighted include a severe series of incursions over Kleine-Brogel air base in Belgium, which houses US nuclear weapons, repeated flights over the Dutch nuclear-sharing base at Volkel described as a deliberate effort to evaluate NATO’s integrated air defence protocols, drones over the French Navy’s Île Longue submarine base in Brittany, and large, military-specification drones above an Irish Navy ship off Dublin on the day of President Zelenskyy’s first state visit to Ireland.
The report places the campaign in the context of the mass expulsion of Russian intelligence officers from European capitals after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which severely degraded the Kremlin’s human intelligence networks on the continent. The drone campaign represents, in part, a technological workaround, substituting airborne reconnaissance for the capabilities Russia lost. The institute argues the campaign’s success rests on the fact that Europe’s air defence architecture was designed for conventional, high-altitude threats rather than low-cost drones making deniable incursions below the threshold of a collective response.
Despite the scale of the activity, no European government has publicly attributed a sighting to Russia or described a coordinated campaign, with officials privately acknowledging Russian responsibility while focusing on national rather than collective responses. The report is also critical of Europe’s counter-drone efforts, noting that the European Parliament concluded in January that the European Drone Defence Initiative lacked the agility and doctrinal coherence to deliver scalable results, and that even a fully operational EDDI would only engage a drone once it enters European airspace, with no mandate over the vessel that launched it. “As long as Russian-linked vessels and its shadow fleet can loiter in international waters or European exclusive economic zones and launch UAVs with effective impunity, the campaign’s primary enabling mechanism remains intact,” the report concludes.
Charlie Edwards, IISS Senior Fellow for Strategy and National Security, said: “The pattern of sightings across 15 months and 13 countries cannot be explained by misidentification or opportunism alone. Russia has demonstrated, repeatedly and in public, that it can penetrate the airspace of NATO member states, including over nuclear sites, without triggering a collective allied response. That gap between capability and political will is now a strategic vulnerability.”
