BREST, France — On Nov. 11, the French town of Mulhouse, nestled between the country’s borders with Switzerland and Germany, was the scene of an unexplained incident: Around midnight, a local policeman reported an unidentified drone buzzing over the police station’s courtyard before drifting toward a nearby rail depot.
Moments later, the aircraft positioned itself directly above a military convoy transporting Leclerc main battle tanks, filming the armored column at close range before vanishing into the night.
Authorities opened an investigation into the illegal overflight of a “restricted defense area,” but so far have not been able to recover the drone or identify its operator. The local prosecutor’s office stated that “at this stage, there is no evidence to suggest whether this was a deliberate flight over these areas or simply an accidental overflight by the aircraft during another journey.”
It’s a pattern that over the past few months has become disturbingly familiar across Europe. Barely 48 hours earlier and 500 miles to the west, another drone twice breached the airspace above the Eurenco ammunition and explosives plant in Bergerac, one of France’s most sensitive defense-industrial sites.
The facility manufactures the propellants used in Europe’s artillery shells, including ammunition earmarked for Ukraine.
This time, however, French investigators described the flyovers as “deliberate” and “clearly targeted,” underscoring the growing concern that the drones are probing Europe’s military capabilities and the factories that supply their armed forces.
The incidents in France are only the latest in a wider surge of mysterious drone activity over NATO territory. In recent months, German authorities have logged repeated overflights above the Ramstein Air Base, Rheinmetall arms factories, and even critical energy infrastructure.
While Moscow has denied any involvement, many in Europe believe that such incidents are part of a wider, “hybrid” campaign waged by Russia against NATO countries.
“These are unattributable, asymmetric actions — but the pattern is increasingly clear. Many of these plots and attacks are being carried out at the behest of Russian intelligence services”, Ned Price, a former CIA analyst and State Department spokesman in the Biden administration, told The Washington Times.
Denmark was the first northern test case.
On the evening of Sept. 22, Copenhagen’s main airport was forced to shut down for several hours after what police later described as a “capable” or “professional” actor flying large drones repeatedly through restricted airspace, disrupting traffic at one of Scandinavia’s busiest hubs.
Within days, similar drones, or UAVs, appeared over other strategic sites, including the Aalborg, Esbjerg and Sonderborg airports and, most alarmingly, the Skrydstrup air base where Denmark’s F-16s and incoming F-35s are based.
Danish media reported drones orbiting the base for hours the nights of Sept. 24 and Sept. 25, without being intercepted. That sparked a political row over why systems designed to protect frontline jets could not neutralize small off-the-shelf aircraft.
After repeated drone incursions shut down Danish airports, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a video message that “over recent days, Denmark has been the victim of hybrid attacks” and warned that such flights “could multiply.”
Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service later made the assessment explicit, stating that “Russia is conducting hybrid warfare against Denmark and the broader West,” and framing drone incursions, GPS jamming and other incidents as part of a broader Russian campaign.
The same evening that Copenhagen shut down, Norwegian radar also picked up suspected drones near Oslo’s Gardermoen airport, prompting temporary restrictions there as well.
For Norway, this incident wasn’t a first: In the autumn of 2022, as the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged, offshore oil and gas platforms in the North Sea reported a wave of unidentified drone sightings, serious enough that police installed dedicated detection systems on some rigs and warned of the risk of accidents or deliberate attacks.
Commenting on the suspected Russian use of tankers to launch drones into NATO airspace, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “Russian shadow fleet tankers are likely being used to launch drones into NATO airspace.”
This claim was reiterated by Navy spokesman Dmytro Pletenchuk, who described them as tools for reconnaissance and sabotage in international waters.
In parallel, Norwegian officers detained several Russian citizens at airports and border crossings for flying drones or carrying them together with memory cards full of imagery. This pattern has fueled suspicions in Oslo that at least part of the activity is linked to Russian intelligence.
Germany, too, has encountered such incidents with alarming regularity: In December 2024, German security services had confirmed that “mystery drones” had been seen over the US Air Force’s Ramstein base — the main hub for American operations related to Ukraine — as well as over facilities belonging to arms manufacturer Rheinmetall and other strategic sites.
Police did not publicly name any suspect, but officials linked the flights to a growing threat of Russian espionage and sabotage on German soil since the start of the full-scale invasion.
By October 2025, the German government reported 172 drone-related disruptions to air traffic in 2025 alone. The spike prompted draft legislation giving police explicit authority to shoot down threatening drones and creating a specialized federal drone-defense center, due to start work in mid-December, to coordinate detection and interception of hostile UAVs.
Nowhere, however, has the vulnerability of NATO installations to drones been as stark as in Belgium. Over two weekends in late October and early November, multiple unidentified drones flew near Kleine-Brogel air base, a site widely believed to store US tactical nuclear weapons.
Defense Minister Theo Francken described the pattern as a “spying operation,” telling Belgian media that small drones appeared to have probed security radio frequencies before larger systems came in later to “destabilize” the area, all while successfully evading jamming.
“They come to spy, to see where the F-16s are, where the ammunition is, and other highly strategic information,” Mr. Francken said.
At roughly the same time, unidentified drones forced the temporary closure of Brussels and Liège airports, cancelling or diverting dozens of flights and stranding hundreds of passengers overnight.
In response, Belgium has rushed to improve airspace surveillance, convened its National Security Council, and accelerated plans for a new national air-security center that will coordinate police, air-traffic control and the military against unauthorized UAVs. As the small country hosts both NATO and EU headquarters, the incidents have become a major national security concern for its government.
Taken together, the French, Danish, Norwegian, German and Belgian cases seem to form a pattern: small, commercially available drones, operating at night or in poor visibility, repeatedly testing the seams of NATO’s air defenses around air bases, logistics hubs, energy infrastructure and now, even nuclear storage sites.
While some European officials are wary of directly accusing Moscow without hard proof, the geography and timing suggest Russia has taken a keen interest in the factories, ports and bases that are essential to sustaining Europe’s support for Ukraine.
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