{"id":41005,"date":"2026-05-13T15:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/41005\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T15:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T15:44:11","slug":"europe-must-get-its-act-together-on-drone-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/41005\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe Must Get Its Act Together on Drone Defense"},"content":{"rendered":"

In what has almost become a routine occurrence, military drones involved in the Russia-Ukraine war have again crashed in NATO territory<\/a>. On May 7, two drones entered Latvia from Russian airspace, one of them exploding at an empty oil storage facility. Luckily, no one was injured, but the incursion is part of a troubling pattern\u2014one that highlights the inadequate pace of European military planners\u2019 efforts to put countermeasures in place.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, incidents like this one have occurred almost too often to count. Just weeks after the war began, a drone, most likely Ukrainian, flew undetected for hundreds of kilometers<\/a> over Romania, Hungary and Croatia before crashing near Zagreb. Russian drones crashed in Romania<\/a> in 2023, and in Poland<\/a> and Lithuania<\/a> in 2025. In March, a Ukrainian drone struck the chimney of a power station in Estonia<\/a>. Another drone veered off-course in April<\/a>, coming down in Finland.<\/p>\n

The most egregious incident occurred on Sept. 9, 2025, when at least 19 drones entered Polish airspace<\/a> from Belarus. They were later identified as Russian Gerberas, an unarmed variant of the Iranian-made Shahed 136, a one-way \u201ckamikaze\u201d attack drone. In response, Polish F-16s were scrambled, helped by several aerial assets from other NATO states, most notably Dutch F-35s, which together with the Polish F-16 shot down three of the drones.\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In what has almost become a routine occurrence, military drones involved in the Russia-Ukraine war have again crashed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,4,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-41005","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-europe","8":"tag-drones","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european-union"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}