IISS Report on European Drone Incursions: Separating Confirmed Russian Operations from Misidentification Cases

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has compiled what is arguably the most comprehensive account to date of European drone incursion events — incidents that have unsettled military bases, airports, and nuclear facilities across the continent since late 2024. The report's central claim is serious: Russian intelligence services launched a coordinated surveillance campaign, using Moscow's so-called "shadow fleet" as mobile launch platforms. The dataset of 144 incidents is real, the overall pattern is troubling, and one incident in Swedish waters comes closer to ironclad evidence than anything else in the story.

Yet the report itself half-acknowledges a problem: a significant proportion of the sightings that triggered the panic have since collapsed under scrutiny. Copenhagen Police closed a nine-month investigation in June 2025 without confirming that any drone had been present over Copenhagen Airport. Belgian public broadcaster VRT found no firm evidence of "hostile drones" in Belgium and revealed that the defence minister had mislabelled footage of a police helicopter as a video of a "large drone." After nine years of covering this beat, the drone panic cycle — inflate, then deflate — is a familiar one. This report does both: it issues a credible warning about a state actor while simultaneously bundling in large numbers of celestial objects, aircraft, and helicopter sightings.

IISS Documents 144 Incidents Across 13 Countries Over 18 Months

The IISS analyzed 144 drone incidents across 13 European countries between August 2024 and February 2026, concluding it is "highly likely" that the Kremlin conducted a coordinated UAV campaign on the continent. Approximately 48% of sightings occurred over military facilities, 18% over civilian airports, and 26% over ports and energy infrastructure. Germany alone recorded 58 incidents.

The report, first disclosed by The Guardian and The Times, asserts that Russian-linked vessels disabled their AIS transponders before approaching European coastlines to serve as drone launch and recovery platforms. The targets identified carry clear strategic significance: drones were reported over RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk in late November 2024 — a base to which US nuclear weapons were subsequently deployed in July 2025. In December 2025, five incursions were recorded over France's Île Longue submarine base; Belgium's Kleine-Brogel and the Netherlands' Volkel air base — both hosting US B61 nuclear weapons under NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements — were also targeted. Co-author Charlie Edwards argues that the pattern across 15 months and 13 countries "cannot be explained purely by misidentification or opportunism" — the single most consequential sentence in the document, and one that deserves rigorous scrutiny.

The Swedish Case: The One Piece of Unambiguous Evidence

The report's strongest evidence involves an incident in the Øresund Strait in February 2026. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was anchored off Malmö for a NATO Baltic Sea exercise when a Swedish naval patrol vessel detected a drone launched from the Russian signals-intelligence vessel Zhigulevsk and successfully jammed it approximately 7 nautical miles from the carrier.

Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonson confirmed the drone was likely of Russian manufacture, and USNI News reported that the launch was directly observed from the Russian vessel. This is the only publicly documented incident in the entire campaign linked to a specific Russian platform. This is what a confirmed maritime-launched incursion looks like: a named ship, an observed launch, a military response, a minister on the record. When evidence exists, attribution is not shy.

Measure the remaining 143 incidents against that standard — most do not clear it. The report relies heavily on "proximity" — shadow-fleet vessels repeatedly appearing near sighting locations — rather than traceable launches. Proximity over 15 months is a signal, but it is not the same thing as the Malmö footage.

Belgian Public Broadcaster Debunks Its Own Country's Drone Panic

Belgium is the clearest cautionary example of why individual sighting reports should not be taken at face value. Between September 2025 and January 2026, the country recorded 558 suspicious drone reports, leading to airport closures in Brussels and Liège and triggering emergency counter-drone procurement spending. Defence Minister Theo Francken described the incursions as "professional operations" and carefully pointed the finger at Russia.

VRT's investigative programme Pano then conducted a deep-dive investigation. Francken acknowledged in parliament that a video he had personally shared as footage of a "large drone over Brussels Airport" was in fact a police helicopter searching for a suspected drone. He later admitted that the majority of the 550-plus reports were false alarms; military intelligence assessed that of 250 reported sightings over military camps, only approximately 42 were genuine — and no physical evidence was ever recovered. Not a single drone was captured during the entire episode; none were shot down and examined. The Netherlands found no wreckage after firing on something near Volkel; Germany searched the cargo vessel Hav Dolphin, linked in reports to UK sightings, and found no evidence of any launch connection. For a crisis of this scale, the physical trace amounts to a corrected helicopter video — which itself is worth sitting with.

Denmark's Split Verdict: The Most Honest Version of the Story

The incident that ignited the European drone crisis concluded with a divided verdict that neither side of the debate has quoted in full. On 22 September 2025, Copenhagen Airport was closed for nearly four hours following reports of a suspected drone. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called it the "most serious attack" on Danish critical infrastructure. Nine months later, Copenhagen Police closed the case without confirming a suspect — or confirming that any drone had been present at all.

Chief Superintendent Søren Thomassen told reporters: "We cannot confirm that there was drone activity at or around the airport." He simultaneously added that police could not rule out the presence of a drone either. What sceptics consistently omit: one week before the police closed their case, the Danish Armed Forces — drawing on soldier observations and technical data — separately concluded that drones had flown over Danish military facilities on multiple occasions in September.

The honest read is therefore not "the Danish case was fake" but something more nuanced and stranger: there was real drone activity over military sites, the national-headline airport incident was unconfirmed, and no suspect was identified in either strand.

That distinction is exactly what gets lost most easily inside a 144-row dataset. The pattern will be familiar to anyone who tracked the 2024 New Jersey drone incidents or watched officials mistake the constellation Orion for a drone swarm. Under pressure and in poor nighttime visibility, aircraft, helicopters, satellites, and bright planets become "drones" with remarkable regularity. The IISS knows this — which is why the report carefully avoids claiming every sighting was real or Russian-directed — but that caveat has largely disappeared from the media headlines the report generated.

The Missing Sensor Data Is Itself Evidence

Sceptics point to a concrete evidentiary gap: electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensor data. Drone motors and batteries produce distinct thermal signatures; military bases and police helicopters carry EO/IR turrets designed to capture exactly those signatures. When reports describe 20-plus lit drones over Lakenheath and no thermal imagery surfaces, that absence is worth taking seriously.

The report's mention that the Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone uses an internal combustion engine — a detail seemingly intended to echo Lakenheath witnesses' descriptions of a petrol engine sound — has some persuasive force, but it is neither a tracked airframe nor a recovered one.

None of this means the entire campaign was fabricated. The Boracay, boarded by French commandos, genuinely had a Chinese captain and two Russian Moran Security Group private military contractors aboard — that is documented. The Zhigulevsk launch is documented. The reduction in sightings that followed European navies beginning to intercept shadow-fleet vessels in 2026 points to a real causal mechanism. The most honest read is this: a genuine Russian maritime drone operation existed, but a continent-wide collective panic inflated around that kernel well beyond what the evidence supports.

DroneXL Perspective

Two things can be true simultaneously, and refusing to hold both is what has caused recurring failures in covering this story. Russia almost certainly launched drones toward NATO nuclear facilities from ships, and Sweden has the receipts — that is real, it is serious, and pretending otherwise to demonstrate contrarianism is its own form of dishonesty.

But the number 144 carries rhetorical weight the underlying evidence cannot support, because a substantial portion of those incidents have been walked back by the very governments that first reported them.

Not everything people see in the night sky is a drone. We said it about New Jersey. We said it about a former governor photographing Betelgeuse. We said it about Denmark before Copenhagen Police reached the same conclusion. Belgium showed us the cost of ignoring it: a defence minister calling a police helicopter a hostile drone, a €50 million no-bid procurement, and a criminal investigation into that procurement.

The standard worth holding to is not an unreasonably high one: name the ship, show the track, provide EO/IR imagery, recover hardware. Sweden managed the first three in a single afternoon. If a genuine state-backed drone threat deserves a serious response — and it does — it deserves serious evidence, not a wall of unverified sightings that discredits the confirmed cases sitting right next to them. The strongest argument against Russian drone incursions is a sloppy report about Russian drone incursions. This one is better than most, but it still lets ghost sightings hitchhike on real events — and that sentence will be quoted by Moscow's denialists for years.

Sources: The Guardian, The Times, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Reuters, USNI News, VRT NWS.

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