Unidentified flying objects¶
In September 2025 Russian drones crossed into Poland, and reports of drones closed airports in Denmark and then Germany. The counting that followed was done by governments, police hotlines, safety agencies and ministries, and each counted what reached it, which is how counting has always worked.
Nineteen over Poland¶
On the night of 9 to 10 September 2025, 19 Russian drones breached Polish airspace, Poland’s deputy foreign minister told the UN Security Council. Two days later NATO launched Eastern Sentry, and its Secretary General, Mark Rutte, called the incursion “the largest concentration of violations of NATO airspace”. A year later the Commission President described an attempted drone attack in Leipzig as “An attack using military-grade material, carried out by Russian operatives on European soil.”
These drones were tracked, and governments named who sent them. They are the easy ones.
Long sequences welcome¶
On 25 September 2025 the Danish police asked citizens who saw a drone to film it with their phones, without zooming in, so that it could be placed in the landscape. “Film gerne lange sekvenser”, the notice added: long sequences welcome. It was sound advice, and it turned a nation into a detection network with a battery life.
The next day the police had received more than 500 reports in 24 hours, from citizens and others, across all police districts. Five hundred reports in a day measure, above all, how many people were looking up.
Not proven¶
Reports of drones stopped traffic at Copenhagen Airport for four hours on 22 September 2025. In June 2026 Copenhagen police told a press conference, DR reported, that they could neither prove nor rule out that drones had been there. There had been activity in the air that could not immediately be explained. Nine months of investigation had reached a verdict a Scottish jury would recognise.
Munich suspended flights twice in 24 hours in October 2025, after what the BBC called “unconfirmed drone sightings”, with around 6,500 passengers affected the second time. Both airports are on the list Commissioner Brunner read out in February 2026. A European Parliament briefing of October 2025 counted at least ten countries reporting sightings over airports and military installations, and noted that many of the devices recovered so far “were unarmed and some merely decoys”.
An airport closes on a report. The count of closures is exact. The count of drones behind them is not.
Confessions extremely rare¶
EASA’s annual safety review counted 21 accidents and serious incidents involving drones in its member states in 2024. A third of them involved a manned aircraft, up from a tenth in 2023. A drone pilot who causes such an encounter is required to report it. Self-reporting by pilots flying above their permitted height or outside their permitted zone is, in EASA’s words, “extremely rare”.
The system relies on the rule-breaker to write in, and the post is light.
Two ledgers¶
The UK Ministry of Defence recorded 266 drone incidents near defence sites in 2025, up from 126 in 2024, and put powers to take drones out into the Armed Forces Bill. The Ministry of Justice recorded 1,712 drone incidents at prisons in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, and 1,497 in the year to March 2026.
The bases doubled their count and the prisons lowered theirs. Both ledgers record what somebody saw and wrote down.