> 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.
A bunch of kids were able to figure out which ships were the source of these drones. Good work. I assume/hope this information wasn't new to intelligence agencies.
Relevant questions to ask here:
- were these ships not tracked and monitored 24/7 since they left Russian ports?
- in fact aren't all ships that leave those ports not tracked?
- isn't the journey of ships in the so-called shadow fleet documented in detail so that it is exactly known what's on board and who is buying it?
The answer to this is: of course that is all happening and known.
And the obvious one: why weren't these ships dragged to a port and completely dismantled to the last bolt?
Answer to that: that would be an escalation as these ships are in international waters and protected by maritime law. The obvious counter to that is that military aerial activity launched from foreign ships technically is an escalation in itself that could be considered a direct act of war.
I'm not going to speculate further on this. But it's obviously a highly political topic and not some kind of intelligence failure.
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-...)
I am puzzled that the alleged ship-launched drone swarms were allegedly able to penetrate this far undetected.
Here in the First Island Chain we've had Chinese drones buzzing our military installations since before COVID.
In Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia, the sound of drones buzzing overhead usually means an entire family is about to get murdered because ONE guy's pattern of behaviors pegged him as a "terrorist" in some computer system.
Europeans are just finally being shaken out of their false sense of security and don't know how to handle it.
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.
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 (with various degrees of success, but at least they're got the right spirit). 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.
Edit: I am not saying to literally use a shotgun against them. But offensive solutions need to be developed and put to use; otherwise if we sit helpless now, what will we do when those drones evolve and start carrying offensive payloads? Fear-mongering and finding endless excuses about not doing anything is not going to help.
Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.
Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.
My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.
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.
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).
Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless.
Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.
Hint:
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-War-Against-Sweden-Submarine/d...
Be glad stuff isn't exploding yet, we are at war with Russia. Did people expect no damage would happen inside Europe?
So this article will change nothing. russia will continue blocking airports and EU won't do anything about it.
>EU set to indefinitely freeze Russian assets
https://www.rte.ie/news/europe/2025/1212/1548621-eu-russia/
You don't have to respond to provocations in a simplistic way that doesn't really effect the enemy
Shooting the drones would probably have Russia laugh and send twice as many next time. Financial actions can help. Blocading their oil might finish things.
This legislation does not make any difference nor to putin nor to the russia in general.
Drones will continue flying over NATO bases with full impunity.
Denmark is also (I believe) looking into this.
I suspect that over the next year more and more EU countries will follow suit.
But we are slowly waking up.
Citation?
And you are forgetting that there are still US troops in Germany. The US is not some passive bystander in this conflict but a very active part of the decision process here. And given that some of those military installations probably have US military in them, it's very much a topic that concerns them.
I don't think anyone believes an attack is imminent. But that kind of intelligence gathering is a pretty serious breach of security.
This weakness is a NATO wide problem and you can't ignore the role of the US in this apparent weakness. It's apparently pushing for de-escalation rather than further escalation. I think we'd know of Trump felt strongly about this. He'd be tweeting about this. His silence on this is suggestive.
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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.”
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...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.
Yes agree. There is no incentive that intelligence services would communicate their findings, in fact it's the opposite lol
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.
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.
>“This must be the essence of our greatness. . . enemies everywhere” (p.20). The central thesis of Russia’s War on Everybody is that the Kremlin defines its enemies sweepingly, such that only a fraction of these “enemies” consider Russia to be their enemy. As Giles documents, “the Kremlin’s daily business” includes what some in the West would consider “acts of war” – poisoning dissidents, shooting down planes, election meddling, cyberattacks, and blatant political assassinations. Giles describes the Kremlin’s zero-sum worldview, in which anything benefitting others is a threat to Russia, and demonstrates that the Kremlin’s ambitions are far broader, and its methods more pervasive, than most realise. https://www.e-ir.info/2025/11/18/review-russias-war-on-every...
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.
Both are still defending the action of Russia and blaming the EU and NATO for the Russian aggression.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Just like countries DECIDE to join the EU and not the Warshaw pact.
But, I see that Russian propaganda is doing its job.
You're argument is just a way to work backwards from the outcome Russia wants, not a reality.
Russia has said it is about Russian speakers. Russia has said it is about nazis. Russia will say anything to try to validate their war.
A problem with the west is they persuaded Ukraine to give up its nukes in return for a bit of paper saying the west would help protect it and then when push came to shove they were wimpy about it.
Furthermore, if having an interest in something gives the right to use military power to achieve that interest then the argument applies to everyone.
The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality. On the other hand a NATO build out IS a political reality.
So I think rather than focusing purely on what one country wishes it's better to analyze things in terms of what the political realities are and which is better.
In that sense NATO is meant to be a deterrence. Russia doesn't like that. If you ask yourself whose vision of the future is better then the answer is clear. A world of where rule of law is the norm and invasions are deterred is preferable. There has been tremendous peace and prosperity in the EU because of NATO and people have just gotten used to it. They have taken for granted the cost and sacrifice that this peace came from.
However, simply saying that Russia has an interest in not having NATO on their border is almost tautological. Of course they don't want that, but so what. Peace only works if it's enforceable.
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.
>The report states that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was illegal and occurred "in sweeping and systematic fashion", and was welcomed by the Trump campaign as it expected to benefit from such efforts. It also identifies multiple links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
I guess the US people just decided they were ok with a Russian backed president?
Europe is the sick and dying man is maybe overstating things. They've been understandably a bit anti-war following the centuries of war culminating in WW2.
We either need to squash Russia like the toxic vermin it is, or accept that we are too useless to even do that.
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.
I'm pretty sure NATO doesnt have drone swarms all over Russian territory right now.
Even in Cold War Berlin each side tried to test out the limits of the other although the Red Army was allowed into a couple of places in West Berlin by agreement like a war memorial.
Russia OTOH has an aging fleet of spy satellites, and drones serve to intimidate as much as gather intelligence.
However, I doubt the drones are part of any kind of spying operation. They're trivially detectable, have limited range, and I very much doubt these journalists found anything that European intelligence agencies haven't found already. If the Russians want to map out European bases, they can just look at the data leaked by Fitbit/Strava and "data broker" companies.
Instead, I firmly believe this is a power move intended to spread fear. They're saying "look at what we're capable of", and _maybe_ measuring anti-drone response strategies, but any competent military wouldn't let themselves get baited into showing their hand too much. The Dutch army has stated that there's no need to panic and that the anti drone measures we currently have is perfectly capable of taking action if necessary.
Russia showing off their capabilities is hardly news, either. Russia likes taunting its enemies by flying fighter jets and sending nuclear subs through shipping channels. The same way America likes to send war ships through shipping lanes in Asia, and during the cold war by flying spy planes awfully close to borders.
The only reason iran and russia do is because theyre too broke to stack mq9 reapers.
I take the point about satellites. That is completely valid. However, one thing military industrial complexes are good at is creating jobs and gobbling up money. Russia's is no different from the west's in that regard.
There is evidence China does this too.
