Game of drones

“Our neighbours aren’t the friendliest, so unfortunately we have to keep a very close eye on them – and it’s not the bears that live in the forest that I’m talking about,” says Jonas Jankauskas*, day commander of Lithuania’s state border patrol in Padvarionys, a village in the south east of the country. The team’s base, just a few hundred metres from the border with Belarus, hosts a group of officers charged with round-the-clock surveillance of a stretch of Lithuania’s 422-mile border with the country. It’s painstaking, monotonous but vital work. A panel of screens show a livestream of radar data and CCTV footage of the border from multiple vantage points. “Everything is investigated,” the station commander tells me. “Most of the time it turns out to be an animal or some mushroom pickers, but of course you have to be prepared for the moment that it is not.”

This wooded, swampy landscape which at the time of my visit in mid-January is covered in a thick blanket of snow, is naturally hostile terrain. It was rendered even more so by the erection in 2022 of a four-metre-high razor wire-topped fence along the entirety of the Lithuanian side of the border; in a video released by the state border patrol even a large brown bear quickly abandons any idea it has about scaling it. Securing the skies, however, has proven much more challenging. Jankauskas shows me footage from October 2025 in which a minuscule black dot is just visible. At first, it looks like a distant bird of prey hovering in the sky but as it steadily draws closer a long, thin, cylindrical body and the sharp-edged silhouette of stylised mechanical wings become visible. The drone, Jankauskas explains, is one of more than 800 such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have infiltrated Lithuania’s airspace over the last year.

A member of Lithuania’s state border patrol with a drone-jamming gun on the heavily fortified border with Belarus. Eight hundred unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus in 2025

Two border patrol officers take me out to show me what happens when a drone is spotted. “The goal is to get close enough to bring it down,” says Marius, who has policed this part of the border for eight years, as we career down a bumpy, snowy dirt track in a 4×4. Colleagues at the base team track the UAV on their screens and provide directions to those out hunting the drone, but if in doubt the officers can roll down their windows and listen. “Normally once you’re close enough you can hear them buzzing, even if you can’t see them,” Marius tells me, gesturing up at the dense forest canopy above us. As we pull up by the border fence a CCTV camera swivels to check out what we are doing. From the boot of the car Marius pulls what looks like a large violin case and points it skyward. It’s a drone jamming gun that works by emitting high-power radio frequencies to disrupt the connection between the machines and their human operators. This one has a range of approximately three miles. “It’s very easy to use, you don’t need to be precise,” Marius tells me. “You just shoot it in the general direction and the drone’s just going to tumble out of the sky.”

So far, the vast majority of the UAVs that have been caught traversing the Lithuanian border don’t appear to pose an imminent threat. Back at the base camp, station commander Jankauskas shows me a photo on his phone of a two-metre-long grey drone that crashed into a field close to the border. On the underside you can see duct tape holding some of the parts together. Like most of the UAVs that cross Lithuania’s border, it didn’t carry an explosive payload, but cartons of cheap cigarettes from Belarusian factories – the illicit trade in tobacco from Belarus costs the EU millions of euros in lost tax every year.

As well as drones, smugglers also use weather balloons to transport their contraband cargo into Lithuania. Designed for use by meteorologists to gauge atmospheric conditions, around 600 of these helium-filled devices entered Lithuania from Belarus in 2025, up from just three in 2023. Available online for as little as £100, the balloons have proven particularly vexing for the Lithuanian authorities. Flying at six to eight miles above ground level they free-float on the wind, meaning that jamming guns are useless. They frequently drift over Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, which is just 21 miles away from the Belarusian border as the crow flies. Flying at a similar altitude to cruising planes, they have wreaked havoc at the city’s airport; between October and November 2025 the country’s main aviation hub was forced to close dozens of times, with more than 350 flights cancelled.

​​The idea that a ‘lost’ drone flew all the way from Ukraine over Belarus to Lithuania and by chance landed at a military base is laughable” — Aurimas Navys

Lithuanian authorities say that the balloons’ collision course with the busy international airport is not accidental. On 9th December 2025, the country’s government declared a nationwide “emergency situation”, warning that the barrage of UAVs and smuggler balloons represents a “hybrid attack” on the country orchestrated by Belarus’s Kremlin-aligned president Aleksandr Lukashenko. Alluding to the allegedly close ties between Lukashenko’s family and the trade in contraband tobacco, Lithuanian president Gitanas Nauseda called the incursions a “deliberate action, aimed at destabilising the situation in Lithuania.”

It’s not the first time that Belarus’s neighbours have accused Lukashenko’s regime of stirring up unrest in their countries. In 2021, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania all declared states of emergency after thousands of asylum-seekers from the Middle East and Africa abruptly began using their borders with Belarus as entry points into the EU. All three countries as well as the EU, Nato and the US accused Belarus of deliberately manufacturing the migrant crisis on the EU’s eastern border. “This attack which Lukashenko is conducting has a mastermind in Moscow, the mastermind is President Putin,” then-Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said of the sudden surge in refugees.

Defence and security expert Aurimas Navys, who was a special operations officer in the Lithuanian armed forces for 17 years, says the same holds true with the surge in smugglers’ drones and balloons across Lithuania’s border. “Nothing happens in Belarus without Lukashenko’s say-so and he doesn’t do anything without Putin’s approval,” he tells me. “This situation is a classic hybrid operation. It’s a test of the military, the government, the police, the airport and the border police to see their response. And when they cannot stop these drones and balloons coming, it sows seeds of distrust in society. It’s a very clever strategy, it’s one we’ve seen before here in Lithuania, and it’s one that is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook because it takes advantage of something that is already happening, like contraband smuggling and the migrant crisis, and weaponises it while maintaining plausible deniability.”

Even more troublingly, in late July 2025, Lithuanians received an emergency message on their phones alerting them that a suspicious drone had entered the country from the direction of Belarus and was flying over Vilnius. The UAV, which was later found to be carrying two kilograms of explosives, flew over the capital before authorities lost track of it. It wasn’t until five days later that the drone, identified as a Russian-made Gerbera, was discovered on an abandoned runway at a military training base close to a fertiliser factory, its payload having apparently fortuitously failed to detonate.

While the Lithuanian government’s official position is that the drone was likely to have veered off course after being redirected by Ukraine’s air defence, some military experts have expressed scepticism that the Gerbera was deflected some 300 miles from its intended destination. “The idea that a ‘lost’ drone flew all the way from Ukraine over Belarus to Lithuania and by chance landed at a military base is laughable; you would have to be an idiot to believe such a thing,” Navys tells me. “Of course for politicians it is easier to say this than it is to admit it was a deliberate provocation and that they couldn’t do anything about it.”
 

Lithuania has eyed Russia’s aggression in Ukraine nervously. As well as its border with Kremlin-aligned Belarus – which allowed its territory to be used in the launch of Moscow’s wholescale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – the small Baltic state also neighbours Kaliningrad, a strategically important Russian exclave surrounded by EU countries. History has given Lithuanians good reason to be nervous of their neighbours’ imperialist ambitions. For five decades, running up to 1991, Lithuania was under Soviet occupation. Up to 30,000 Lithuanian partisans, known as the ‘forest brothers’, were killed resisting the Soviet regime and another 28,000 people died after being deported to forced labour camps or remote settlements where they faced perilously harsh conditions.

In April 2025, Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergey Naryshkin threatened that Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which have a combined population of just  6.5 million, would be the “first to suffer” in the event of Nato “aggression” against Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s intelligence service has warned that Moscow is preparing for military action in the region as early as 2027. “It’s a possibility and it’s one that I think Lithuanians, given their history [with Russia], are mentally preparing for,” says Jack Twiss Quarles van Ufford, the Dutch ambassador to Lithuania. The Netherlands contributes around 350 out of the 1,600 soldiers in Nato’s enhanced forward presence battalion stationed in Lithuania, a deployment which is set to be bolstered by another 5,000 troops from Germany by 2027.

The long-term goal of Russia is to recreate what they see as their sphere of influence, essentially the Russian empire” — Jack Twiss Quarles van Ufford

Such an attack wouldn’t necessarily be a full invasion, as in Ukraine, says Twiss Quarles van Ufford, who was formerly a high-ranking official in the Dutch intelligence service, but is more likely to be a bid to snatch and occupy a chunk of territory – a strategy deployed by Russia in Crimea in 2014 and in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008. A moment of particular risk for Lithuania he says, might come if there were an end or pause to the fighting in Ukraine. “If there is a peace deal or some kind of deal that freezes that conflict then there is a danger that Russia uses the moment to rally its capabilities and go on to its next ‘adventure’ [in the Baltics],” he tells me. “The pattern is very clear, and if you listen to what Moscow says, and we should take note because they are very clearly and repeatedly saying this, the long-term goal of Russia is to recreate what they see as their sphere of influence, essentially the Russian empire… and the Baltics are very much a part of that vision.”

Western Europe is slowly beginning to wake up to the reality of the threat posed to the continent by Russia, says Navys. “Lithuania has always understood this war wasn’t about Ukraine per se… but before it was always like ‘Okay, you guys [Lithuanians] have this historical trauma with Russia, you’re paranoid… the Russians have changed, they’re not so bad anymore, do business with them, buy gas from them,’” he tells me. “Now I think finally the picture is becoming clearer for western Europe because it’s not just Lithuania or the Baltics or even eastern Europe that have been affected by these drones – they’re above Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, they’re everywhere, it’s not possible to ignore [them] anymore.”

A series of nations have been looking anxiously skywards in recent months. On 9th  September 2025 a series of Nato countries scrambled jets in response to a fleet of some 20 drones entering Poland’s airspace via Belarus. Citing both the number and the flight paths of the drones – one reached the Gdansk region, more than 400 miles from Ukraine – Polish officials said it was unlikely that the incident was an accidental spillover from the war next door. Addressing the country’s parliament Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned that the nation faces “an enemy that does not hide its hostile intentions” and that it is “closer to a conflict than any time since the second world war.”

Since then, unidentified drones have been spotted across the length and breadth of Europe, hovering around military bases in the Netherlands, shutting down airports in Sweden and Norway, buzzing over nuclear power stations in Belgium and loitering over a gunpowder production plant in France. Drone-related disruptions to European airport operations more than quadrupled between January 2024 and November 2025 with Belgium, the hardest hit country, halting flights 10 times in one eight day period in November last year. Meanwhile in 2025, Germany recorded a total of more than 1,000 suspicious UAV sightings in the vicinity of military bases and other critical infrastructure. Similarly, the British ministry of defence reported that the number of “drone incidents” in the vicinity of army bases had more than doubled year on year with 266 sightings in 2025.

Some governments have been quick to lay the blame squarely at Russia’s door. “[Putin] is waging a hybrid war against us,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz said of the spate of drone incursions blighting his country. “We will not be intimidated and we will defend ourselves appropriately.”

A member of Lithuania’s state border control with a downed drone in Padvarionys, Lithuania, in January 2026

However Vladimir Putin has shrugged off such allegations, and concretely linking Russia to most of the mysterious drone incidents across Europe is challenging. Speaking during a visit to Kyiv in December 2025, Dutch prime minister Dick Schoof told reporters that there was broad consensus among European leaders that Moscow was behind the incursions but, he lamented, “we can’t prove it.” One major problem is the lack of physical evidence. While UAVs are routinely shot down during conflicts, peacetime armies face strict restrictions about where and how they can legally take action to combat them. And when it comes to protecting civilian infrastructure it is usually police forces, which lack specialist equipment and training to take down drones, that hold the responsibility.

A lack of adequate counter-drone detection systems at ports and airports, as well as the potential harm that falling debris could cause to people if a downed drone hurtled to the ground in a populated area, have also limited security forces’ ability to respond proactively to the incursions. To date, of the thousands of suspicious UAVs spotted over Europe in the second half of 2025, remnants have been retrieved and verified as being of Russian origin in only a handful of cases. In all these incidents the drones were either shot down or crashed in countries on Europe’s eastern periphery, in Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Latvia or Moldova, and were claimed by Russia to be an accidental spillover from the war in Ukraine.

Screens at a Lithuanian base show live data and footage from the border with Belarus, a 422-mile stretch that is monitored around the clock

Drones facilitate this grey zone of war,” says Dr Beryl Pong, principal investigator at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Drones and Culture, a research hub that looks at the impact of UAVs on everyday life. “When they are used in Ukraine, in an active combat zone, then, sure, it’s clear this is an act of war. But when you have incidents, as we have been seeing across Europe, in a place which isn’t explicitly at war [with Russia], then it becomes murkier,” she says. “You can buy drones on the high street that can be tinkered with and hacked to use in nefarious ways if that’s what you want to do. Basically, the only limits are what the drone is capable of carrying and your imagination… You don’t need specialist skills to fly them. Some people have pored over the videos [online] and claimed, ‘Oh, these drones look like larger fixed-wing drones and those tend to be used by people with more skill’, or what gets referred to as ‘capable actors’, but ultimately there’s no definitive proof and no one can say for sure what’s being flown, where it came from or even what happened to it afterwards.”

Unlike most battlefield weapons, drones can be used for both military and civilian purposes. It is this ambiguity that makes them an ideal instrument to use for psychological operations, known as “psy-ops”, campaigns designed to influence an enemy population’s morale and state of mind. “In the broad sense a drone is not good or bad. It can be used for hobby photography, scientific research, to monitor crowds, or to deliver medical equipment, but it can also be used to spy, to drop tear gas or an explosive payload… It’s all about the intent of the operator and, at least from the point of view of the person on the ground, that’s very opaque,” says Pong. “Some politicians have said, quite explicitly, that Russia is behind these drones [in Europe] and that creates the feeling that war is very much on our doorstep. Of course this has psychological effects on the population. It creates a feeling of vulnerability and general unease, because it’s not an attack but it feels malevolent and people, quite rightly, start to ask: ‘How did these things get into our airspace? Why are they there? And why can’t we stop them?’”

Maybe it’s Russia. Maybe it isn’t. The reality is we just don’t know…” — Dr Beryl Pong

It’s this feeling of insecurity that can contribute to a phenomenon known as “drone confusion” – a form of confirmation bias that causes people to mistake benign lights in the sky for UAVs, often after seeing media reports about other sightings. In a review of 61 alleged incidents across Europe a Dutch drone enthusiast website, Dronewatch.nl, concluded that it could only be proven that the flying devices were of Russian origin in three instances, while 17 cases were determined to be either hobbyists flying UAVs or sightings of something that was not a drone at all. In the remaining 41 cases it was not possible to say conclusively whether there was a drone or, if there was one, who was flying it. Examples of misidentification cited by Dronewatch include reports of a UAV that shut down Denmark’s second largest airport, Billund, but later transpired to be a “shining star in the sky” and a drone sighting in Belgium that was likely to have been a combination of a police helicopter and a DHL cargo plane according to VRT, the country’s national broadcaster.

This is not the first time that drone hysteria, fuelled by intensive media coverage of drone sightings, has taken a hold. In 2024, panic gripped the US as a spate of drone sightings spread from New Jersey across the country, sparking rumours of a hostile state conducting espionage and even an alien invasion. An FBI investigation, however, concluded that more than 5,000 reports of suspicious UAVs, made over the course of just a few weeks, were in fact a combination of helicopters, legally flown UAVs, aircraft and stars. The apparent mass hysteria followed media reporting and highly publicised social media posts about the alleged drones. Erroneous fear-driven sightings, however, may be at least in part the point, says Pong. “Maybe it’s Russia. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe some are and others aren’t… The reality is we just don’t know… [but] the aim of psy-ops is exactly to generate these feelings of uncertainty and to menace a population.”

A volunteer assembles first-person-view drones for the Ukrainian army in a drone workshop on 12th February 2026 in Lviv, Ukraine

Even if Russia is in fact only behind some of the incidents, defence experts say that Europe’s seeming inability to respond to or prevent incursions should be ringing alarm bells. “This is a test of Nato’s capabilities and resolve. It’s about revealing vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can be exploited if and when necessary,” says James Patton Rogers, executive director of the Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University and an expert on drone warfare. “It’s all very well to say ‘Oh these aren’t attack drones’ but, in most cases, we actually have no idea if that’s true and, even if it is, that doesn’t mean they won’t be next time. We don’t know what’s on board these systems in terms of payload. Are they armed with the ability to deploy grenades? Are they conducting espionage? Whichever way you cut it, the fact that Europe seemingly can’t stop these drones flying over sensitive sites and critical infrastructure is a problem.”

One of Europe’s major challenges is that its air defences are designed to detect, track and neutralise relatively large, high-altitude targets like cruise and ballistic missiles, making them ill-suited to preventing incursions by small, low-flying drones. Current systems are also cost-ineffective to use against swarms of cheap UAVs that often include decoys. “Poland should be a major wakeup call,” says Rogers, referring to Nato’s deployment of Black Hawk helicopters and F-35 fighter jets to shoot down just three of the 20 drones that entered Polish airspace in September 2025. “Millions of dollars were spent taking down a system that can cost as little as $5,000 and can be sent in the dozens; that’s clearly not sustainable economically.”

Attack drones have been a feature of conflicts since the early 2000s when large UAVs were a key asset for the US in its ‘war on terror’. Capable of flying for 24 hours and carrying laser-guided bombs and missiles, drones like the Reaper, which cost tens of millions of dollars, were used to carry out so-called ‘precision strikes’ against high-profile targets while minimising risk to US-led forces. However, while drone  warfare was initially the preserve of advanced militaries, the development of cheaper models, particularly Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 and Israel’s Harop ‘kamikaze’ (single mission) drone – which cost around $5 million and $700,000 respectively – opened up the battle for the skies to a host of mid-sized militaries. In 2020, the use of TB2s and Harops by the Azerbaijani military against Armenian forces proved decisive, with Azerbaijan using them to regain substantial swathes of territory in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region in a 44-day war.

UK defence secretary John Healey is shown the Tekever AR3 drone at a production facility in Swindon in September 2025. The launch of the AR3 is part of an expansion of the UK’s defence manufacturing capabilities

The conflict in Ukraine, however, has seen drone warfare evolve to a new level.  At the start of Russia’s wholescale invasion in 2022, the war was fought largely with artillery, and drones were used sparingly, mostly for reconnaissance. But by 2023, just a year later, the use of first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones had become a ubiquitous feature on both sides of the frontline. Built from commercially available components, the FPV drones’ cameras give pilots wearing virtual reality goggles a bird’s eye view of their quarry on the battlefield below. Travelling at around 37 miles per hour, the so-called ‘suicide’ drones, capable of carrying a payload of up to five kilograms, are impossible for infantry soldiers to outrun and currently account for around 75 percent of battlefield losses in Ukraine. Even more crucially, they are cheap to produce at just $300 to $500 per unit. By 2025, Ukraine had ramped up its domestic production of drones, the vast majority of which were FPV kamikazes, to around 200,000 per month, a fourfold increase on the first quarter of 2024.

Technological innovations have continued apace on both sides. In 2024, Russia began using ultra-thin fibre optic cables to physically tether FPV kamikaze drones to their operators, a move that meant the killer UAVs no longer needed to use radio waves to carry out missions and were therefore immune to jamming devices. The technique was quickly adopted by Ukrainian forces and today the country’s battlefields are strewn with miles of discarded cable. Another major development came in 2025, when the use of ‘last-mile’ targeting became a common feature of FPV kamikaze drones. The AI-powered automated system enables drones to autonomously travel the final stretch towards targets if the connection with its operator is severed. In February 2026, Ukraine warned of another deadly advance in Russia’s drone arsenal, namely that Russia had adapted Gerberas, which have a range of up to 350 miles, to use as ‘motherships’ that can carry and then launch short-range FPV kamikaze drones deep inside Ukrainian territory.

It’s not just Ukraine and Russia, or even nation states, that have realised the utility of drones in modern warfare. Globally, says Rogers, 118 militaries and 65 non-state groups, ranging from the Islamic State to South American drug cartels, now have drones in their arsenals. With the spectre of drone warfare looming large, European nations are also looking to ramp up their investment in UAV technology and production. In April 2025, the European Commission (EC) announced €910 million as part of its European Defence Fund to support innovative defence projects in member states, with drones and counter-drone technology earmarked as priority areas. In November 2025, the British Ministry of Defence announced it had awarded a £316 million contract to the UK wing of MBDA – a multi-national outfit that develops, designs and manufacturers complex weapons – to deliver DragonFire systems to the Royal Navy from 2027. This counter-drone defence uses laser beams to shoot down UAVs and is capable of hitting targets the size of a £1 coin flying at speeds of up to 400 miles per hour.

Meanwhile EC president Ursula von der Leyen has proposed that Europe build a ‘drone wall’ along its eastern periphery by 2027. The proposed counter-drone system is not a physical barrier but would likely consist of a layered series of defensive and offensive measures including acoustic sensors, radars, jammers and tracking and inceptor drones. However, talks between European nations about exactly how to build the ‘wall’ and, most importantly, who will pay for it have so far made little progress. Frustrated by the lack of momentum, in December 2025 Poland announced it would go it alone and build its own anti-drone fortifications. It plans to have parts of its drone-defence ‘wall’ operational within just six months, with the entire project completed in two years.

This is a test of Nato’s capabilities and resolve. It’s about revealing vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can be exploited when necessary” — James Patton Rogers

In Lithuania, the military is taking steps to bolster the number of drone operators in its ranks. In the past year alone, a training programme at its General Stasys Raštikis military academy has already delivered a basic drone training course to more than 600 soldiers. When I visit the classroom, a cohort of students are hard at work using thin-tipped paintbrushes and magnifying glasses to apply a weather-proof coating that protects the mechanical workings of a drone from snow and rain. When they’re finished the instructor checks their work with an ultra-violet light to reveal any missed spots.

“The basic aim of the initial three-week course is for students to be able to fly drones,” says Major Arnoldas Sadauskas, head of the unmanned systems training course. “Those that do well progress to a more advanced level, learning how to troubleshoot problems and carry out more complex programming.” In the coming year he hopes to increase both the volume of students graduating  from the course and its scope. “Ukraine has really shown us how important drones are to modern warfare, so the goal is simple: to provide a basic proficiency to as many Lithuanian soldiers as possible. It’s my view that we can’t have too many soldiers trained in this field,” he tells me.

The country is also investing in its domestic drone tech industry. “Europe has to innovate and keep innovating to be ready for the wars of the 21st century. The speed in this field is unbelievable – it’s a constant evolution and if you don’t keep moving then you’re going to be overrun,” says Vytenis Buzas, executive chairman at Unmanned Defence Systems (UDS), a Lithuanian company awarded almost
£2.8 million as part of a state-backed venture capital fund initiative. “We develop counter-measures, then the other side will then counter those with counter-counter measures. It’s an endless cycle.”

Intelic, an Amsterdam-based defence company, is adopting a similar approach. Founded at the end of 2021, just months before the wholescale invasion of Ukraine, the company initially focused on automation but after testing products on the ground in Ukraine realised there was a far more pressing need for an integrated counter-drone system that would keep pace with technological developments. “One of the core principles of our product is to try and overcome the issues of fragmentation that you find,” says Maurits Korthals Altes, Intelic’s CEO. “Let’s take a tangible example. You have a drone circling an airport [and] at some point, you lose track of it on the radar, so you think ‘Let’s send a reconnaissance drone to tail this known object and just follow it.’ Then you decide, ‘Okay, let’s take it out, let’s use an interceptor or a drone with a net.’ This sounds so incredibly simple. You might think: ‘Why can’t we do that already?’ The problem is we have the individual capabilities, but we don’t have the ability to coordinate all the systems – the cameras, the sensors, the radars – and that’s why in Poland, for example, you see F35s being used to take down a couple of cheap drones.”

Intelic’s new counter-drone software system built in collaboration with DroneShield, an Australia-based defence company, aims to overcome exactly these problems. In a demonstration, Korthals Altes shows me how a single user-friendly interface allows an operator to toggle between weapon systems, camera angles, radar data and maps in real-time. The software, which is set to be tested at Nato training exercises in the summer of 2026, works with a host of different defence and weapons system providers.

Anne Marie Dailey, a researcher with global policy think tank RAND, which is focused on security and strategy in Europe and Russia, warns that counter-drone defences are only part of the solution. “It’s not that Europe shouldn’t be investing in countering UAVs, because it’s a highly likely vector of attack,” she says. “But it should also be considered, given the limited resources available, how much money should be spent on it.”

Building a costly ‘drone wall’, says Dailey, is unlikely to do much to deter Moscow from any aspirations it harbours to invade another European country. “Saying, ‘Oh, we have strong UAV defences’ does not scare Russia, it will not deter Russia. Buying tons of long-range artillery, tons of cruise missiles and building fighter jets and submarines, that’s what I’d be doing right now if I was a European nation; those are things that might give Russia pause for thought.”

Drones alone are also unlikely to prove a decisive factor in a war between large militaries, says Dailey. “Ukraine hasn’t won this war with drones and nor has Russia,” she says. “And Ukraine isn’t asking for drones. Ukraine wants 155-millimetre artillery shells. Ukraine wants long range smart weapon systems in missiles. But it hasn’t been able to get those because Europe and the United States wouldn’t supply them. So drones aren’t the best thing, they’re the next best thing.”

In this context, the spate of mysterious incursions could, she suggests, be viewed as an even bigger psy-op; namely a ruse designed to draw European spending away from more pressing defence needs. “Think of Napoleon in Moscow, you can get drawn in and only when it’s too late do you realise you’ve been forced to spend so much on achieving this goal and been so committed to this course of action that it’s left you vulnerable elsewhere.”

This vulnerability is felt acutely in Lithuania. At the Medininkai border crossing into Belarus we pause for a few minutes at a large black granite memorial for seven Lithuanian police officers and border officials who were killed here on 31st July 1991 by Soviet forces who refused to recognise the country’s declaration of independence. “The drones and balloons are a new development, so of course they are worrying and the situation feels more uncertain,” says border patrol officer Marius, who was born the same year the Medininkai massacre took place. But, he points out, the threat from Russia and Belarus isn’t new. “Vilnius is in easy artillery range of the [Belarusian] border, and that has always been the case, so whether they walk, shoot or fly [drones] across it, we have to be ready for them.”

*Name changed at interviewee’s request

A brief history of drones

How unmanned aerial vehicles took over the battlefield

1930s

The Royal Navy develops a radio-controlled version of the De Havilland Tiger Moth aircraft, nicknamed the ‘Queen Bee’, for target practice by warships. In the following years the UK and US develop a new series of such remotely operated vehicles.

1991

The Pioneer surveillance drone is deployed in the First Gulf War for reconnaissance. In February 1991 it becomes the first UAV to be surrendered to by an enemy, when Iraqi soldiers on Failaka Island wave white sheets at one.

October 2001

Flights by armed US Predator drones begin over Afghanistan, with the first strike following a month later. Predator and Reaper drones cost tens of millions of dollars each and are used for laser-guided attacks on high-profile targets.

2020

$700,000 Harop drones are deployed by Azerbaijan in its 44-day war against Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Footage from drone attacks on Armenian soldiers is broadcast on electronic billboards in Baku.

2023

First-person-view single-mission ‘kamikaze’ drones costing as little as $300, carrying up to five kilos
of explosives and controlled with VR headsets become ubiquitous on both sides of the front line in the Russia-Ukraine war.

2025

‘Last mile’ targeting becomes common in drones used in the Russia-Ukraine war, allowing drones to travel the last stretch towards targets without human intervention, making jamming devices ineffective against them.

Friday, August 28th, 2026 - In the mag Long reads Slow Journalism