Four unidentified drones breaching a declared no-fly zone along President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s flight path into Dublin should have been a sobering demonstration of European readiness. Instead, it exposed how little protection exists against a threat that Russia has already normalised over Ukraine – and is now exporting into EU airspace.
According to Ireland’s The Journal, sailors on the LÉ William Butler Yeats observed four drones operating inside a restricted zone in the Irish Sea on Monday evening, just beneath the route taken by Zelenskyy’s aircraft. The drones flew at least 17 kilometres from the north-east, loitered over the naval vessel and then returned along the same bearing.
Ireland had no radar coverage on the ship, no means to track the systems beyond eyeball observation and only handheld counter-drone devices ashore. Debates reportedly took place on board about shooting the drones down, but no action was taken. The article’s blunt conclusion was that Ireland had “no capacity” to determine what the drones were, who controlled them, or where they went afterwards.
This was not a minor gap on the EU’s geographic fringe. It was a breach of a security bubble put in place for a visiting wartime head of state, at a time when Russian services have a clear record of using drones for intimidation, probing and sabotage. Yet even here, with maximum political attention, a hostile actor – state or otherwise – could put multiple uncrewed aircraft into a presidential flight corridor and leave unchallenged.
The Dublin incident is not an isolated anomaly. The following day, French marines activated counter-drone procedures at Île Longue in Brittany, the operational hub of France’s four ballistic-missile submarines – the core of its nuclear deterrent. Five unidentified drones overflew the base; security forces “intercepted” the overflight, with officials later clarifying that a jammer rather than live ammunition had been used and that no drones were confirmed downed and no operators identified. That one of Europe’s most heavily protected military sites can be penetrated by unknown uncrewed aircraft without attribution illustrates how permissive the air environment has become.
Belgium, host country to NATO headquarters, offers a third example. In early November, Defence Minister Theo Francken confirmed that at least three large drones conducted what he described as a “clear mission” over Kleine-Brogelair base, which hosts F-16s and is widely believed to store US B61 nuclear bombs under NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements. A police helicopter, several vehicles and a handheld “drone gun” were deployed; a dedicated jammer was also used. None of these measures succeeded either in neutralising the drones or even maintaining contact with them. Francken admitted that Belgium had “fallen behind because we stood still for years” and is now scrambling for hundreds of millions of euros in emergency counter-UAS funding.
Across these cases runs a common thread: Europe’s political institutions recognise the problem, but the security apparatus remains largely unprepared to act against it. The European Parliament has already condemned Russian drone incursions and other hybrid acts as part of “systematic military and hybrid warfare” against the EU, and has explicitly encouraged member states to take “coordinated, united and proportionate action … including shooting down airborne threats”. Yet as recent incidents show, the ability to detect, attribute and, if necessary, destroy drones over critical sites is uneven, under-funded and constrained by legal ambiguity.
Those legal constraints are not a detail. As Jamie Shea notes in a recent analysis for Friends of Europe, police in Germany, for example, still lack clear authority – and often the equipment – to shoot down suspect drones, while the Bundeswehr is limited by the Aviation Security Act in what it can do in civilian airspace in peacetime. Similar uncertainties exist across member states: who is the first responder if a drone loiters over a civilian airport but may be controlled by a hostile intelligence service? Who takes the decision if it crosses from a civilian site towards a military installation? In Ireland, sailors hesitated for fear of debris; in France, communications shifted from talk of shots fired to insistence that only a jammer was used. The pattern suggests not calm control, but systems that are improvising on the fly.
So far, Europe has been lucky. The drones over Dublin, Île Longue and Kleine-Brogel are not reported to have carried explosives. But the payload potential is not theoretical. Many commercial-class drones can lift tens of kilograms. During the Cold War, the United States deployed the W54 family of ultra-light nuclear warheads, with core devices around 23 kg and physical dimensions small enough to be carried by a single soldier. There is no evidence that any current actor intends to place such weapons on drones in Europe; however, the physics of what a small aircraft can carry should focus minds. If European forces cannot reliably detect or stop unarmed reconnaissance drones today, they are also not in a position to prevent future platforms carrying high-explosive, chemical or radiological payloads.
The Ukrainian battlefield has already demonstrated how quickly inexpensive uncrewed aircraft can change the character of warfare – from first-person-view loitering munitions to long-range strike drones and dense, layered counter-UAS defences. Yet the EU still procures air-defence assets on timelines measured in years, while its adversaries iterate hardware and software in weeks. The result is a widening gap between the speed of the threat and the speed of the response.
Europe’s vulnerability is therefore less a question of money than of seriousness. The basic measures are clear:
continuous low-altitude surveillance and dedicated drone radars around airports, nuclear facilities and major bases;
electronic-warfare and kinetic counter-drone systems permanently deployed, not held as niche capabilities;
harmonised EU-level rules of engagement defining when and by whom drones can be jammed or shot down, with liability rules adapted to hybrid warfare rather than peacetime commercial disputes;
structured cooperation with Ukraine to import battlefield-tested counter-drone technologies and practices into European air-defence and policing.
What the Dublin, Brest and Kleine-Brogel incidents show is that Europe is still operating, legally and institutionally, as if drones were a marginal nuisance rather than a central instrument of hostile statecraft. Allowing unidentified systems to loiter unchallenged over a presidential flight path, a nuclear-submarine base or a nuclear-sharing airfield is not caution; it is an invitation to further escalation.
Until EU governments match their rhetoric about hybrid threats with practical, enforceable and properly funded counter-drone defences, these incursions will continue – and the margin for error will narrow.
First published on defencematters.eu.
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