Tag: drones

Mystery Drone Incursions in NATO Airspace Spark Europe-Wide Concerns Over “Hybrid Warfare” Threats

On September 22, air traffic at Copenhagen Airport came to a standstill when as many as three unidentified drones appeared in its airspace, forcing controllers to shut down Scandinavia’s busiest hub and divert dozens of flights. 

What could have initially been seen as an isolated disruption soon emerged as the opening salvo in a surge of recent alleged drone incursions across NATO territory—an escalating security crisis exposing serious gaps in European drone defenses and compelling the alliance to recalibrate its strategy. 

In the past week, multiple NATO member states have reported mysterious overflights of military installations, airports, and critical infrastructure, prompting governments to scramble their defenses, question the perpetrators’ motives, and warn that a new, low-level form of hybrid warfare may be unfolding over Europe. 

From northern Germany to France’s interior, the pattern has become unmistakable: drones of unknown origin operating with impunity in NATO airspace. 

“The number, size, flight patterns, [and] time over the airport. All this together indicates that it is a capable actor,” Police Inspector Jens Jespersen said after the Copenhagen sightings. “Which capable actor, I do not know.”

Following repeated incursions, including near Copenhagen, Oslo, Aalborg, and Billund airports, the Danish government announced a nationwide ban on all civilian drone flights from September 29 through October 3. 

The measure coincides with Copenhagen’s preparations to host a summit of European Union leaders on strengthening Europe’s common defense and continued support for Ukraine. 

“Denmark will host EU leaders in the coming week, where we will have extra focus on security,” Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen said in a statement. “Therefore, from Monday to Friday, we will close the Danish airspace to all civilian drone flights.”

“In this way, we remove the risk that enemy drones can be confused with legal drones and vice versa,” Danielsen said. 

However,  Denmark isn’t alone in feeling exposed to this recent unidentified drone threat. In Germany’s northernmost state, Schleswig-Holstein, authorities reported multiple drone sightings on the night of September 26. 

“Of course, we in Schleswig-Holstein are also investigating every suspicion of espionage and sabotage in this case and remain very vigilant in this area,” Schleswig-Holstein’s interior minister, Sabine Suetterlin-Waack, told Reuters. 

That same day, French authorities reported unauthorized drone activity over the Mourmelon-le-Grand military base. French media reported the incident prompted heightened security at the installation, which houses the 501st Tank Regiment and has previously served as a training ground for Ukrainian troops.

Throughout the week of September 22, unidentified drone incursions were similarly reported flying near critical infrastructure in Sweden, Finland, and Lithuania. 

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Denmark Bans Civilian Drone Flights Ahead of EU Summit

Denmark banned civilian drone flights on Sept. 28 ahead of a meeting of European Union leaders in the country later this week.

The move comes after unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were observed at several military facilities on Sept. 28. Other drone activity forced the temporary closures of several Danish airports on Sept. 22.

Copenhagen Airport itself was shut for almost four hours.

The ban barred civilian drones from Danish airspace from Sept. 29 through Oct. 3, when Denmark, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU for the second half of this year, will be hosting European leaders.

Violations are punishable by a fine or imprisonment for up to two years.

“We are currently in a difficult security situation, and we must ensure the best possible working conditions for the armed forces and the police when they are responsible for security during the EU summit,” Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said on Sept. 28.

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Frigate, Radars, Troops Rushed To Copenhagen To Defend Against Mystery Drones

European nations are beefing up security in Copenhagen amid an ongoing wave of reported drone sightings in the Baltics and Scandinavia. The movement of counter-drone systems, advanced radars, a German frigate, a French helicopter and troops is designed to protect this week’s European Union meetings in the Danish capital. 

The sightings, over military installations and civilian airports, have also prompted Denmark to close its airspace to civilian drones for a week starting today after the incursion forced it to shut down a half dozen airports last week. In Norway, authorities said flights had to be diverted on Sunday because of unknown drones over airports there.

While Denmark has called the drones part of a “hybrid attack,” officials there have stopped short of saying definitively who is responsible, Reuters noted. However, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has suggested it could be Moscow, calling Russia the primary “country that poses a threat to European security.” The Kremlin denies any involvement.

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Assessing Reports That Ukraine Is Preparing A False Flag Drone Provocation Against NATO

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised global awareness of Hungarian media reports about a planned Ukrainian false flag drone provocation against NATO in her Telegram post on Friday. She hyperlinked to one of the outlets, Pesti Srácok, a little more than two hours after they published their editorial. It ended by citing unspecified Telegram posts about Ukraine’s plans to bomb logistics hubs in Poland and Romania with captured Russian drones and then blame Moscow.

Accordingly, there’s no solid intelligence about this, just social media reports that were picked up by the Russian Foreign Ministry and amplified by their spokeswoman. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that such a scenario isn’t credible, especially given the larger context. Trump just greenlit NATO downing Russian jets that violate the bloc’s airspace, which could arguably embolden some members to attempt this on false pretexts, thus risking a major escalation of NATO-Russian tensions exactly as Ukraine wants.

Likewise, if the most zealously anti-Russian ones along the alliance’s eastern frontier ultimately get cold feet after fearing that Trump might hang them out to dry, Ukraine could nudge them in the direction of offensive operations against Russia disguised as “reciprocal retaliation” via this false flag plot. The essence is similar to what Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned about twice over the summer regarding joint British-Ukrainian plots to stage false flag provocations in the Baltic Sea.

According to their sources, this would involve Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian torpedoes hitting a US ship there or at least exploding in close proximity to it and/or fishing up Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian mines, either of which could suffice for pulling Trump into mission creep. They could also falsely justify offensive actions on the grounds of “reciprocal retaliation”, albeit at sea in these scenarios, while the latest one that Zakharova warned about could include drones, airstrikes, and/or a no-fly zone.

Russia continues to gradually gain ground in the special operation zone, and while no breakthrough has yet to occur, the military-strategic dynamics are clearly in its favor and decisively against Ukraine’s. Taken to its conclusion, this trend will inevitably result in Russia controlling all the disputed territory with time, thus enabling Moscow to end the conflict on more of its terms by then. Ukraine wants to avert that scenario so it’s desperately trying to engineer the game-changer of direct NATO intervention to that end.

It’s only through such a dramatic development that the abovementioned dynamics could possibly be altered to at the very least freeze the conflict, which Ukraine and the West have demanded of Russia to no avail since that would leave unmet many of its goals in the conflict, ergo Ukraine’s false flag motives. Having captured Russian drones bomb NATO logistics hubs in Poland and Romania via a modern-day “Gleiwitz incident” as Zakharova described Ukraine’s reported plans to be might easily achieve that.

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Drone Maker DJI Loses Lawsuit Over Inclusion on Pentagon’s ‘Chinese Military Company’ List

China-based drone maker DJI will remain on the Pentagon’s blacklist of Chinese companies working with Beijing’s military, after a D.C. federal judge dismissed its lawsuit challenging the designation on Sept. 26.

In his 49-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled that the Pentagon’s finding that DJI contributes to the Chinese defense industrial base is “supported by substantial evidence,” even though he “cannot conclude” that DJI is “indirectly owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”

“DJI acknowledges that its technology can and is used in military conflict but asserts that its policies prohibit such use,” Friedman wrote. “Whether or not DJI’s policies prohibit military use is irrelevant. That does not change the fact that DJI’s technology has both substantial theoretical and actual military application.”

In other words, Friedman concluded that the Pentagon had presented enough evidence to call DJI a “military-civil fusion contributor” to China’s defense industrial base.

DJI, a private company headquartered in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, sells more than half of all commercial drones in the United States. In October 2024, it filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon after the latter placed the Chinese drone maker and many other Chinese companies on its list of “Chinese military companies” operating in the United States, under Section 1260H of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.

In a complaint, DJI called the Pentagon’s decision “unlawful and misguided,” and said that it “is neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military.”

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How Weed Surveillance Drones Destroyed the Lives of These Californians

The drone hovered low, whirring like a giant bug above the lush, green northern California fields. Its camera was trained on the curved roof of an aging dome home. Inside, Keni Meyer, a petite, ponytailed 54-year-old, didn’t know her property was under surveillance again. But the Sonoma County authorities were taking another step in a harassment campaign, ostensibly aimed at unpermitted cannabis grows.

Drone photos of the property spurred the county to allege a series of building code violations. Those citations drew Meyer into a doomed six-year fight to save her property, as Sonoma’s covert cannabis surveillance operation warped into an attack on less affluent residents. For dozens if not hundreds of people, a crackdown on unlicensed cannabis crops has led to six-figure fines, foreclosures, and evictions. The result has been tears and devastation—even for folks, such as Meyer, who did not grow cannabis at all.

In June, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on behalf of three other Sonoma County residents. The suit says the authorities’ “runaway spying operation” violates constitutional protections against unlawful searches. Officials, the lawsuit charges, deployed a fleet of high-powered drones that could hover at 50 feet and capture high-quality video footage with precision zoom cameras, all while concealing the surveillance from residents, the media, and local oversight bodies.

To the ACLU, this isn’t ultimately about codes, or even cannabis. It’s about the right to privacy.

“We all have the right to live a private life at home without having to worry about a government drone flying overhead and watching us without a warrant or our knowledge,” says Matt Cagle, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “Sonoma County’s drone program demonstrates how technology further disrupts the power balance between governments and people, making it easy for agencies to warrantlessly sift through people’s private affairs at scale and levy charges and fines that upend lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media.”

The lawsuit adds: “Never before has the government been able to deploy, at its convenience, an inexpensive and unobtrusive floating camera, controlled from afar, to surreptitiously monitor and record scenes from above a person’s private property.”

Drive around Sonoma today, and you’ll see plenty of housing that’s ramshackle and almost certainly unpermitted, with many egregious apparent violations. Many residents continue to erect out-buildings without permits, partly because the process is expensive and partly because many of them resent having to deal with Permit Sonoma as a point of principle: It violates their DIY ethos and their sense of rugged frontier freedom.

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Budapest Says Zelensky ‘Is Losing His Mind’ After Allegations of Hungarian Drones Invading Ukrainian Airspace

During the war, Ukraine has remained in a state of constant conflict with Hungary.

But since the Kiev regime bombed the Druzhba pipeline – that was vital for their energy security of the neighboring country – the bilateral relations took a turn for the worse, and seem to have reached the point of no return.

Not content of calling Viktor Orbán and his conservative, anti-Globalist government ‘Putin’s lackeys’ and some such slanders, Kiev’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky has forwarded the seemingly absurd thesis that Hungarian drones would have invaded his country’s airspace.

And the pushback from the Hungarians has been brutal.

Reuters reported:

“Reconnaissance drones that violated Ukraine’s airspace could have flown from Hungary to check the industrial potential of western border areas, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday, prompting a mocking rebuke from Budapest.

‘President Zelenskiy is losing his mind to his anti-Hungarian obsession. He’s now starting to see things that aren’t there’, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a post on X.”

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Massive Drone Attack SHUTS DOWN Major Airport

Copenhagen Airport, Scandinavia’s largest aviation hub, suspended all outgoing flights and diverted incoming traffic after multiple large drones appeared near the facility at 8:46 p.m. on September 22.

The unprecedented shutdown lasted nearly four hours, with operations resuming only at 12:30 a.m. the following day.

Norwegian authorities arrested two foreign nationals for similar drone activity near Oslo Airport’s military installations within 24 minutes of the Copenhagen incident, suggesting coordinated timing that should alarm every American concerned about infrastructure security.

Danish police Chief Superintendent Jens Jespersen characterized the unknown operator as a “capable actor” whose technical proficiency far exceeded typical drone hobbyists.

The sophisticated nature of the operation, involving multiple large drones operating simultaneously near restricted airspace, demonstrates the kind of advanced planning and execution that intelligence agencies associate with state-sponsored activities.

This level of capability represents exactly the type of hybrid warfare tactics that threaten Western democracies and critical infrastructure nationwide.

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Russia unleashes drone-missile attacks on Ukraine

ussia launched a barrage of drone and missile attacks on Ukraine early Sunday, which officials said was one of the most intense attacks on Kyiv since the war began, according to reports.

Authorities reported at least four people were killed nationwide, with more than 14 wounded, and damage suffered to residential buildings, factories, and a cardiology clinic in Kyiv, Reuters reported.

According to Ukraine’s military, Russia launched 595 drones and 48 missiles overnight and air defenses managed to shoot down 568 drones and 43 missiles. 

The capital was the main target of the attacks, with explosions heard across Kyiv for more than 12 hours, Reuters also reported.

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FAA Records Add ‘Black Cube’ Sighting to Wright-Patterson AFB Drone Mystery

Newly released Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents obtained by The Black Vault under FOIA case 2025-04622 add significant new information to the still-developing story about a series of unauthorized drone incursions at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) in December 2024. These records, drawn primarily from the FAA’s SKYWATCH system, supplement the earlier Air Force FOIA release (2025-01757-F) previously covered by The Black Vault, and they introduce a striking new element: the report of a “black cube”-shaped “UAS” observed at around 16,000 feet.

SKYWATCH is an FAA operations security platform used to collect and disseminate reports of suspicious or unauthorized aerial activity, often relayed through Air Traffic Control Towers, FAA regional offices, and the Domestic Events Network. It serves as a central alert system for potential security risks, with reports often shared with law enforcement and military security forces.

Here is a breakdown summary of the events just released as a result of this case, and drawing from the SKYWATCH system. The documents themselves (located at the bottom of this article) go into greater detail.

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