There's a big story out today about a Russian spying effort that has been operating in the UK and throughout Europe. Russia's shadow fleet of tankers, all flying false flags, have been helping the country avoid U.S. sanctions on Russian oil for years. But a new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) says the tankers have also been used as a platform for Russian drones to spy on U.S. allies.
The drones “exploited numerous gaps” in Nato air defences during a “sustained” 15-month campaign by the Kremlin, according to a report published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Among them was RAF Lakenheath, a US base in Suffolk that is preparing to host nuclear bombs. In November 2024, drones breached its airspace, along with three other US sites in England. A sanctioned Russian tanker docked in Hull at the time has since been blamed for launching the drones.
Bases across Europe were also spied on. A secret submarine base at Île Longue in Brittany, northern France, which houses the bulk of the country’s nuclear missiles, was targeted as well as air bases containing nuclear bombs in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Analysts pinpointed the dates and times of drone sightings at military bases, airports and critical civilian infrastructure in 13 European countries between August 2024 and February 2026. On each occasion, one or more Russian shadow fleet tankers happened to be nearby.
This report is limited to drone sightings in Europe but I can't help but think back to the rash of drone sightings on the U.S. east coast which happened in December 2024. That's within the range of this series of incursions in Europe.
As the mystery grows around the drones flying over New Jersey, so do the calls from puzzled residents to authorities about the flying machines. Reports of drone sightings have spread from New Jersey to other states, including Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Connecticut and Ohio.
Federal authorities on Sunday repeated assurances that the drones are not a security threat. But they still don't know where they came from or who is responsible.
Meanwhile, some state and federal officials called for Congress to pass expanded legislation that would give federal authorities greater resources to mitigate risks from drones.
The Trump administration later said these were authorized drones and not the enemy:
"I do have news directly from the president of the United States that was just shared with me in the Oval Office, from President Trump directly, an update on the New Jersey drones," Leavitt said.
"After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons. Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones," she added. "In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy."
Maybe that's true or maybe a calculation was made that it wasn't worth escalating a conflict with Russia over some drones. That certainly seems to be what happened in the UK where drone sightings were repeatedly downplayed as insignificant at the time. This is from the IISS report:
Our argument is not that every reported sighting was Russian-directed, or that every reported sighting involved a UAV, but that the aggregate pattern of UAV sightings cannot be adequately explained by misidentification, hobbyist activity or opportunistic harassment alone. Attribution remains a key challenge for European governments, and none have, to date, publicly attributed a UAV sighting to Russia or gone as far as to describe a coordinated Russian UAV campaign over Western and Northern Europe. One reason, European officials have suggested to us as part of our research, is that the relevant governments focused on the national response rather than connecting the dots across Europe...
Open-source reporting of each incident in the IISS dataset suggests the Kremlin’s campaign exposed political fractures within the Alliance, as well as exploiting the gap between what European militaries could do and what their governments were prepared to authorise. And the campaign demonstrated, repeatedly and in public, that the threshold for collective punishment was higher than European deterrence postures have previously assumed.
Remember that spy balloon that flew over the U.S. with a bunch of spy cameras? That came from China and while we shot it down after it had passed over the U.S. the only real response to the spying (that we know of) was some sanctions on Chinese aerospace companies.
In general, the penalty for getting caught spying is pretty low in terms of consequences. Russia has been taking advantage of that and the deniability that comes from drone flights. If instead of tolerating this NATO had started seizing and impounding shadow fleet tankers, the western world might be in a very different place by now.
