When Munich airport had to close on 2 October after a suspected drone incursion, dozens of flights were cancelled and thousands of passengers left stranded on the eve of a German national holiday and the famous Oktoberfest.
A week earlier, Copenhagen and Aalborg airports were closed following sightings of “unmanned aerial systems” in Danish airspace. In the month since a swarm of Russian drones violated Polish airspace – three were shot down – a rash of similar incidents has been reported across Germany, the Baltic and Nordic countries, often over power plants and military bases.
Russia’s alleged “hybrid war” has suddenly begun to feel a bit close for comfort for many Europeans: potentially reaching into cities a long way from the frontline, comfortably untroubled – until now – by the fallout from the war raging in Ukraine.
Public anxiety is mounting, particularly at Nato’s borders, reported Daniel Boffey and Miranda Bryant earlier this week – the strange red lights that people on the west coast of Norway keep seeing are a new source of collective stress. Their feature found echoes in history of what is now happening: Soviet “ghost planes” caused panic in the 1930s and UFO sightings were common in subsequent decades.
Suspicion that the Kremlin is orchestrating a shadow war of sabotage and subterfuge on Europe is not new, although Moscow denies it. Fiona Hill, the former White House Russia adviser, warned in June that Russia was “already at war with Europe”. But the latest drone episodes suggest a gear change; that Russia is accelerating the hybrid campaign in daring new ways. Moscow may be using oil tankers from its illicit “shadow fleet”, for example, as a launchpad for drones, including those that forced Denmark to close its airports.
Challenges in defending the grey zone
How do European leaders reassure anxious citizens when they themselves lack any certainty about how to respond? “Our police must be able to shoot drones down immediately,” the Bavarian premier Markus Söder demanded after the Munich incident. Poland’s government has adopted similarly robust rhetoric.
But shooting down airspace violators, is not always lawful – or desirable. Nato’s European leaders have a particularly difficult tightrope to walk in calibrating their response to ambiguous incursions that fall short of outright military aggression – activity in the so-called “grey zone”.
The attacker’s identity is not always clear. Is it a hostile rogue state or a criminal entity? Nobody wants to be provoked into escalation against a nuclear armed superpower. Yet, doing nothing is not an option either. An overwhelming majority of EU citizens say they want their leaders to unite to protect them from security threats, polls show.
The latest threats are, instead, exposing deep divisions. The resulting perception of weakness, wrote Paul Taylor, risks emboldening Vladimir Putin to prod further.
Ursula von der Leyen presented plans for a “drone wall” – an integrated detection, tracking and interception system to defend Europe’s “eastern flank” – at an EU summit in Copenhagen last week. But the shrill discussion that reportedly unfolded behind closed doors suggests the drone wall is not imminent. Neither Friedrich Merz nor the (domestically embattled) French president Emmanuel Macron showed any support. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni complained that southern Europe was being neglected.
“The worse the situation becomes, the less able they seem to make any decisions,” says Taylor. A lack of mutual trust is now exacerbated by fears that the US cannot be relied on to help, he explained.
Armed with psychology
In the longer term, responding to the hybrid war is as much about psychology as beefing up the armed response capability, some experts believe. “These attacks have two aims,” says Elisabeth Braw, a Swedish security expert and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The first is disruption. The second is to confuse and scare us so we lose faith in our authorities and in liberal democracy. If our systems are too weak to keep us safe, people may conclude, what are they for?”
“Provocations are attractive [to Russia] because they cause chaos and disharmony,” she says. “Ultimately the hope is to get people to flirt with autocracy. It is deeply subversive.”
But by carefully anticipating the chaos around any future disruptive incident, the appeal for the perpetrator can be reduced, Braw argues. Governments in western and southern Europe are “pretty unprepared”. They should learn from Baltic and Nordic states, both in planning and communicating openly that they are doing so. “We may have to close an airport, but we can still show everyone that life keeps going, no matter what tricks they try on us. We can react in a way that minimises panic.”
Hostile grey zone attacks are not just about drones. “Imagine if all of our supermarket chains were taken out of action by cyber-attacks at the same time,” she says.
Miika Ilomäki, chief preparedness specialist for Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency, detailed the country’s stockpiling strategy in the Guardian recently. But Braw says some governments have a deep fear of causing people to panic by discussing threats. “The reality is we will have to face panic at some point, so it is better to talk openly about how we are going to manage. We should have learned that lesson from the pandemic.”
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