Russian and Ukrainian drones are hitting Europe. It could be disastrous ...Middle East

On Monday, French jets shot down a drone, likely Ukrainian, over Latvia, while in Moldova, authorities found the wreckage of another one. With the Ukraine war increasingly fought by unmanned vehicles, European leaders are becoming increasingly concerned about the danger of the conflict spilling over into their territories.

Last month, a Romanian fighter jet shot down an off-course Ukrainian drone over Estonia. The next day, another triggered an air-raid alert in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. And just over a week ago a Russian drone, probably malfunctioning due to Ukrainian air defences, hit a residential building in the Romanian border city of Galati.

These incidents are becoming more frequent as the tempo of long-range attacks increases, and both sides are launching strikes close to the other’s western borders. A Western official told The i Paper that when making their calculations, Kyiv and Moscow had now “baked in” the potential risk of cross-border incursions. Both currently consider the dangers acceptable.

The incidents keep coming. On Friday, Ukraine self-destructed one of its own Sea Baby naval drones inside the Romanian port of Constanța, claiming it had gone out of control because of Russian electronic warfare.

Given that they then blew up three more, the suspicion is that this was a deliberate deployment into Romanian waters, perhaps hunting the tanker MV Safeen Elona.

Unlike the Russian-flagged MV Arctic Metagaz, which seems to have been hit by Ukrainian drones in the Mediterranean in March, Safeen Elona is currently not sanctioned by the UK, EU or US. But last year, Ukraine labelled it an enemy ship. It is questionable whether this gives Kyiv the legal right to try to sink it, especially in foreign waters.

Last week, Greece also issued formal diplomatic protests to Ukraine after another maritime drone was found off the island of Lefkada. Kyiv initially denied any responsibility before admitting it was one of theirs.

There is also a growing acceptance that Kyiv was likely to have been behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany in 2022.

Of course, Moscow also stands implicated. Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace last year and have caused alarm across other parts of Europe. Russia has been blamed for some of the incidents involving Ukrainian drones, although claims that they hacked and redirected one that hit a Latvian oil storage facility in May look implausible.

Responding to the Greek incident, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi called it “the result of circumstances brought about by the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine”.

Nato countries have tried publicly to downplay the situation. The Romanian defence ministry said that “we must understand the reality we are in. Ukraine is a country at war, and Romania is at the border of this conflict. Incidents like today’s are unwanted but can occur.”

Behind the scenes, though, both Russia and Ukraine’s increasing willingness to tempt fate with drones close to foreign borders, and with not-so-covert operations abroad – the Sea Babies are remote-controlled, six-metre-long motorboats packed with up to 850kg of explosives – is prompting growing concerns.

The fear is not simply that stray drones will one day cause fatalities, but that they could begin to undermine support for Kyiv’s cause – or force an unwanted escalation against Russia.

A British Cabinet Office staffer told The i Paper that “we don’t want to lose control of the situation. That’s the concern with these stray drones”.

These concerns influenced last weekend’s E3 meeting in London between the leaders of the UK, France and Germany, and Volodymyr Zelensky, despite the final statement being the usual boilerplate message, long on rhetoric and short on anything new.

There is a growing sense in the EU that as the war becomes more dangerous there is a pressing need for actual dialogue with Moscow. Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, no friend of Moscow, has said it is time for talks, not to negotiate a deal over Ukraine’s head, as Donald Trump has tried, but to articulate Europe’s interests in the matter.

The irony is that it may be Ukrainian drones, designed to force Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, that drive the Europeans there, too.

But who would do the talking, and what would they actually say? At the European Commission, President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas feel they ought to represent the Continent, but their outspoken anti-Russian stances mean they are not credible interlocutors for Moscow.

Putin has suggested his old friend, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, but Schröder’s commercial relationships with Russian oil and gas companies rules him out.

Instead, the E3, uniting the main political, economic and military players in Europe and stretching beyond the EU, look the best options. But at present, Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz are all mired in domestic political difficulties of their own and seem unwilling to risk being seen sitting down with Putin.

For now, Kyiv is rejecting behind-the-scenes appeals to ratchet down its campaign, finally feeling that momentum is swinging its way. Moscow, likewise, sees no reason to take greater care, given that it sees Nato as Ukraine’s close ally.

There have been no deaths from these incidents to date but there is a fear that this is just a matter of time. A calamity might be enough to get both sides to rein in their drone incursions and even to talk about some localised de-escalation, but it would be a terrible price to pay for such progress.

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