Russia Mapped NATO’s Drone Defense Gaps:
Are Europe’s Airports Any Safer?
By Jacob Wirtzer
ParaZero Technologies Ltd.
Executive Summary
- 144 suspected drone incursions
Across Europe were likely coordinated efforts to identify NATO air defense gaps
- Europe has improved drone detection
But still lacks effective, safe interception capabilities
- Airports cannot safely use jamming or explosive interceptors
Leaving runway closures as the primary response.
- The missing layer is non-explosive drone defeat
Highlighting DefendAir as a viable solution for civilian environments.
Airport No Fly Zone – Illustration
Think back to the autumn of 2025. Copenhagen. Munich. Airports across Denmark, Germany, and Spain grounding flights over “unidentified drones.” Tens of thousands of passengers stranded. Official statements assuring the public there was no danger. And then, a few weeks later, it would happen again somewhere else. By May 2026, NATO jets were scrambling over a drone warning at Vilnius airport (Source: AP).
At the time, each incident was treated as its own mystery. A solo hobbyist. A provocation. Something to investigate, resolve, and move past.
We now know better. According to a report published this month, researchers identified 144 suspected drone sightings across Europe between 2024 and 2026, spanning Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and Denmark, peaking in late 2025. Some drones were likely launched from Russia’s shadow-fleet ships off European coasts (Source: ABC News). Analysts assess this wasn’t harassment. It was reconnaissance: a systematic effort to map the gaps in NATO’s air defenses (Source: UK Defence Journal).
Which raises the question every security director and defense planner in Europe should be asking: the airports reopened. Did the gap close?
What has actually been done
Credit where it’s due. Europe has not been standing still. NATO’s Technical Interoperability Exercise 2026 brought roughly 300 participants and more than 60 counter-drone systems to a range in Latvia to test whether they could work together (Source: Defense News). NATO AIRCOM convened industry at Ramstein to accelerate cheaper, faster counter-drone options. The “drone wall” concept is moving from talking point to planning. Denmark and several other countries have pledged to boost their drone defenses.
But listen to the language coming out of those same institutions. Denmark’s own Defense Command admitted its armed forces “could have been in a stronger position” and acknowledged shortcomings in detection equipment (Source: AP). And as Euronews asked bluntly this month: can European industry actually close the gap? (Source: Euronews)
Here is the uncomfortable truth inside that question. Most of the progress has been on the seeing side: radars, sensors, interoperability, command and control. Far less has changed on the stopping side. And at an airport, stopping is precisely where the options run out.
Drone Flying Around US Embassy Compound
Why an airport is the hardest place to defend
You cannot jam at an airport. Electronic warfare that disrupts a drone’s control link can also disrupt aircraft navigation and communications, the one thing civil aviation authorities will never accept. You cannot detonate an explosive interceptor over terminals, fuel farms, and crowds, and you cannot fire high-velocity projectiles that miss their target and land somewhere in a city. And so the standard response to a drone sighting remains the only “safe” option available: close the runway and wait.
That is not a defense. That is the attacker’s objective. A drone that costs less than a business-class ticket shuts down an airport moving hundreds of thousands of passengers and millions of euros of cargo a day, and the operator flies it home afterward. If the 2025 incursions were reconnaissance, this is what they confirmed: Europe’s most critical civilian infrastructure can be probed, disrupted, and mapped at almost no cost and almost no risk.
We’ve seen a version of this lesson up close. In Israel, we anchored much of our counter-drone effort on jamming, until adversaries switched to fiber-optic guided drones that are immune to it. The lesson was the same one Europe is learning now: when you can’t break the link, and you can’t afford collateral damage, you need a way to physically stop the drone without endangering everything around it.
The Tool for That Moment – ParaZero DefendAir Manual Net Launcher
The missing layer
That is the gap that remained open when the airports reopened. Not detection. Defeat. Specifically, a defeat layer that works where jamming is prohibited and where explosive effects are unthinkable.
This is where most military-grade interceptors fail the civil test. Systems built for the battlefield carry warheads, fragmentation, or enough kinetic energy to turn a miss into a hazard. None of that can be certified for use over a passenger terminal. What an airport, a stadium, or a city center needs is an interceptor with no explosive components at all: one that can be employed over people and infrastructure because the worst-case outcome of an engagement is a downed drone, not shrapnel.
That is exactly how ParaZero’s DefendAir was built: non-explosive interception that is RF-independent and safe to operate in urban and civil environments where every other defeat option is off the table. And because DefendAir is system agnostic, it integrates into the detection and command-and-control infrastructure already in place. Closing the gap doesn’t require a procurement overhaul. Instead, DefendAir is the defense archetecture that turns “close the runway and wait” into “stop the drone and keep operating.”
Russia spent two years finding the gaps in Europe’s airspace. The report is public now. The question is no longer whether the gap exists. It’s who closes it first.
DefendAir – Where the Threat Ends, Victory Begins.
