Russia 'highly likely' behind coordinated drone campaign over Europe, think tank says

Russia was "highly likely" behind a coordinated drone campaign over Europe targeting military, nuclear and other sensitive sites, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in a report Thursday.

The report examined 144 incidents across more than a dozen European countries between August 2024 and February 2026, concluding that the Kremlin had conducted a sustained surveillance operation that exposed weaknesses in Europe's air defenses.

Researchers said drones penetrated airspace around nuclear facilities in the UK, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, while also disrupting military operations and forcing repeated closures of major commercial airports.

The IISS said it was "highly likely" that Russian intelligence orchestrated the campaign and "likely" that vessels from Russia's so-called shadow fleet were used as launch and recovery platforms for the drones.

It said the operation represented "a series of tactical successes for the Kremlin and a strategic failure of allied air defense."

The report argued that Europe's existing air defense systems 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.

However, the researchers stressed that they were not claiming every reported drone sighting was linked to Russia.

"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 report said.

According to the IISS, the campaign was intended 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 a wider military response.

The report said European governments had largely focused on incidents within their own borders rather than identifying a continent-wide pattern, contributing to delays in attributing responsibility.

The IISS warned that while initiatives such as the European Drone Defense Initiative are intended to strengthen counter-drone capabilities, Europe's response remains hampered by fragmented legal authorities, inconsistent detection systems and slow attribution processes.