Smoke rises above apartment buildings during a massive Russian attack in Kyiv, Ukraine. On the night of September 28, Russia launched a massive strike on Kyiv. The attack resulted in at least four deaths, at least 14 injured and hospitalised. Photo / Getty Images
The European Union says it will race to build a “drone wall” along its borders with Russia and Ukraine after a spate of drone incidents in Nato airspace exposed the vulnerability of the US-led alliance to cheap, highly lethal weaponry that has changed the nature of warfare.
The drone wall is not an actual wall but rather a network of sensors, signal jammers and layers of military technology to detect and intercept small drones that move in swarms or fly low enough to sneak past standard radars.
The plan, to be deployed across nations on the eastern flank, will cost billions and draw on capabilities tested on the battlefield in Ukraine, where drones – in the skies, on land and at sea – have at times wrought destruction on far more expensive, traditional military equipment and vehicles, including tanks and ships.
Eastern European nations have pushed the need for a drone defence plan. But the idea gained new urgency after recent incursions in Nato airspace, including in Poland, Estonia, Romania and Denmark.
Polish officials said the drones that violated its airspace were Russian. But Danish officials have yet to identify the drones that forced airport closures in recent days, and authorities in Denmark banned all civilian drone flights this week before an EU summit on Wednesday in Copenhagen.
Leaders of the EU’s 27 nations will discuss the drone wall at the Copenhagen gathering, as Brussels arranges financing to boost Ukrainian production. To counter Russia’s drone attacks, Kyiv has used sensors to detect drones by sound and defensive drones that detonate on contact.
Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said that the response to violations of Poland and Estonia’s skies – including the scrambling of fighter jets – showed the alliance stands ready to “defend every inch of allied territory”. But other officials said the incidents laid bare the risk of Nato relying on expensive weaponry to bring down much cheaper drones.
“The other side can just keep throwing things at you,” said Giuseppe Spatafora, an analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies and a former Nato policy adviser.
“There’s only a certain number of fighter jets, each of them carries a certain amount of munitions, which tends to be quite high-tech and expensive. You cannot expend them easily.
“Although Nato has the top-level defence capabilities, they are not enough to deal with cheap drones that can be sent in droves and make a lot of damage.”
Rutte told reporters after the breaches that Nato “reacted quickly and decisively”, although he acknowledged a gap in the kit materiel.
“In the end, we cannot spend millions on missiles to take out drones which only cost a couple of thousand dollars,” he said on Tuesday.
Nato officials stopped short of describing the incidents as deliberate attacks, and Denmark has not directly blamed Russia. Yet with European capitals on edge, leaders are using the cases as proof that they need a drone shield and that Russia is testing Nato’s resolve. Russia has denied any wrongdoing.
As modern warfare takes on a dystopian edge, with AI-powered drones deployed for surveillance or lethal strikes, Ukraine has become a testing ground. Nato countries, having funnelled billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine, say they are now learning from Kyiv’s lower-cost – though hardly foolproof – tactics.
Ukrainian companies, for example, developed a network of sensors that detect drones by their sound and feed the data to patrols carrying machine guns to shoot them down, sometimes from trucks or propeller aircraft.
Ukrainian manufacturers are producing small, semi-automated interceptor drones that take down attack drones by ramming into them – a sort of drone dogfight – or by exploding near them. Kyiv has also used signal-jamming and spoofing to force drones off course.
The EU’s defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, said officials from 10 EU nations – bordering Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic Sea – had agreed on the need for the “metaphoric” drone wall in a meeting on Friday attended by Nato and Ukrainian officials.
“We need to recognise that at the moment our effectiveness to fight drones is not at the level which we need,” Kubilius said, adding that officials would now focus on technical and financial details and seek a green light from their leaders and EU neighbours.
The EU’s role in pushing the drone wall is the latest example of how deeply embroiled it has become in the continent’s rush to rearm, wary of an emboldened Russia and reduced US support under President Donald Trump.
The EU is taking the lead on financing and coordinating such projects, partly because Trump has demanded that Europeans take more responsibility for defending the continent but also because the United States, too, is lagging in anti-drone systems.
“The US is sort of new to this game as well,” Spatafora said. “So the Europeans, basically, they cannot just rely on US capabilities. It’s new for everyone.”
The incursions last month have renewed debate within Nato about how to respond, as some leaders call for shooting down Russian aircraft and others urge caution.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has dismissed the European accusations as “groundless”, “reckless”, and “another significant escalation of tension near our borders”.
“We see that they continue with this militaristic attitude instead of thinking about how to engage in dialogue,” Peskov said on Tuesday. “But we are hearing different voices from European capitals, so we will continue to monitor the situation.”
In Poland, Nato used fighter jets to down some of the drones that swarmed into the country’s airspace. Days later, Nato said its aircraft had repelled three Russian jets from Estonia’s airspace.
Trump has said he supports Nato allies shooting down Russian aircraft that enter their airspace. Whether the US would lend its support “depends on the circumstance”, he said.
This week, Denmark’s European allies are mobilising in a show of strength for the EU summit.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced that his Government was deploying a special unit of its armed forces “to support Denmark with military anti-drone capabilities” including radar systems. A German navy frigate arrived in Copenhagen to assist in aerial surveillance, and the French Defence Ministry also said it sent personnel, a helicopter and active “counter-drone assets” to Denmark.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that Kyiv had sent specialists to Denmark “to share Ukraine’s experience” and to join exercises that “could become the foundation for a new system to counter Russian and any other drones”.
European officials said the proposed drone wall would operate along the eastern frontier from Finland to Bulgaria as a flagship project of EU plans to spend hundreds of billions on defence by 2030.
The project will draw on EU financing, including a new €150 billion loan programme initiated to encourage joint purchases of weapons, as leaders strain to rally their constituents behind a spending surge. Kubilius said the priority is a detection system and that experts estimate it could be ready in a year.
For Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Nato secretary general, that’s too slow. “It’s a question of deploying them, it’s a question of purchasing them,” Rasmussen told reporters at a briefing on Friday. “I urge governments to really speed up.”
Others said the EU needed to act more and talk less. “There’s a feeling that we need to go beyond declarations of ‘Europe needs to do this’ and start doing things,” said a European official. “The drones are one of those things.”
William Booth in London, Beatriz Ríos in Brussels and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
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