Magic Weapons: Drones

As Europe dithers, Russia’s successful drone offensive intensifies.

By Edward Lucas

Source: Land Forces of Ukraine

From Munich to Lviv is 12 hours by car. But the distance from the Bavarian to the Galician capital is far greater when it comes to Russian attacks. Mere reports of mystery drones at Munich airport last week were enough to close it twice in 24 hours. Over the same weekend, scores of Russian missiles and hundreds of drones attacked Lviv, the largest attack there since the invasion. The air defences did their best, but eight missiles and 57 drones managed to strike 20 locations, killing four people and injuring 16.

Russia is attacking Ukrainian cities (and, in a ghoulish new development, passenger trains) as part of its full-scale war. But it is also attacking the countries that support Ukraine, systematically disrupting their aviation industry, spying on critical infrastructure, unsettling public opinion and eroding the credibility of decision-makers. Elsewhere in Germany the authorities are investigating drones that last month snooped on a power plant in Kiel and other critical infrastructure. Denmark experienced even more problems that week. More recently in Lithuania, balloons of the kinds used by cigarette smugglers caused the temporary closure of Vilnius airport. 

What Western decision-makers still fail fully to understand is that these are not separate phenomena. They are part of the same war. The only big difference is that Russia still—bizarrely—enjoys plausible deniability when it attacks European NATO countries. Timid Western decision-makers still try to hush up these sabotage attacks altogether, and hesitate to blame the Kremlin publicly for them. If they did so, their voters would ask hard questions, such as “why can’t you stop this?” 

The truth is, they can’t. As Russia’s disruption campaign increases in scale, it is becoming clear that using drones against civil aviation comes close to being a magic weapon. The hardware costs next to nothing. The machines can be launched from anywhere, by anyone, at any time. You do not need to use a super-secret network of sleeper agents. Just hire a thug to leave a drone or two on a rooftop near an airport, for remote activation hours or days later. 

As with undersea cables (where Russia is thought already to have planted remote-control sabotage devices) it is probably too late to deal with this problem through defense. We control gun ownership in European countries, but not drones. It is not a criminal offense to have one in your possession, even near an airport. Anyone stopped by the police can plead ignorance and innocence. To arrest someone, you would have to catch them in the act of launching the drone: hardly likely. The authorities would do amazingly well if the criminal justice system stopped one in ten drone attacks through such interventions. And that is far too few. The other nine will be in the air, with the perpetrator long gone. Once the drones are airborne it is too late. Shooting them down is costly and risky (suppose debris damages private property?). No civilian airport will stay open while rogue unmanned aircraft are even rumoured to be in the vicinity.

Ukrainians will watch with limited sympathy. They have had no civil aviation since 2022. Their overstretched air defenses must deal with not just nuisance drones, but ones that maim and kill. At least Ukraine hits back. Its sanctions on Russia, delivered via high explosive to oil refineries and pumping stations, are potent. Europe’s measures—now the 19^thpackage of sanctions—have been dismally ineffective. Russia is clearly not deterred. Indeed, Europe’s too-little, too-late approach has clearly had the opposite effect, encouraging the Kremlin to intensify its efforts. Who wants to explain that to the voters?  

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By Edward Lucas. Edward Lucas is a Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. Article first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.