Following Germany’s accusation against Moscow over the Leipzig drone, von der Leyen finally uses the term ‘attack on Europe’

It took almost a month for the drone found on 4 August on the southern runway at Leipzig-Halle Airport, just a few metres from a Ukrainian cargo plane, to become a political issue. Yesterday, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt explained that the equipment used was already known from other Russian hybrid operations linked to the war in Ukraine, and that the federal government holds Moscow responsible. Berlin has ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russisches Haus, a cultural centre in the heart of the German capital considered, in effect, a spy den. Today, Ursula von der Leyen received Mark Rutte at the Berlaymont and used the word that people in Brussels tend to treat with great caution: ‘attack’. “I want to be very clear: this was an attack using military equipment carried out by a Russian operation on European soil,” the Commission President said at the press briefing with the NATO Secretary-General. “We will not tolerate this.” She added that “not only will we keep the pressure on Russia high, but we will increase it”. Rutte, standing beside her, said that Russia had become more brazen but “does not frighten us”, and that Euro-Atlantic unity is “unshakeable”.

What is new is that, until now, Brussels had never combined the following elements in a single sentence: military equipment, an operation attributable to the Russian state, and European territory. On 8 October 2025, at the Strasbourg plenary session on airspace violations, von der Leyen had said that it was time to call a spade a spade: “This is hybrid warfare”, and before that “a deliberate and targeted campaign in the grey zone against Europe”, adding that “every square centimetre of our territory must be protected”. In her State of the Union address on 10 September 2025, just a few hours after the drones over Poland, she had spoken of a violation “of Polish and European airspace”. In May 2026, regarding the Baltic states: a threat against one Member State is a threat against the entire Union. But “hybrid war” and the “grey zone” are categories deliberately constructed to remain below the threshold of armed attack. Now that threshold is being explicitly mentioned, immediately following the formal formation of a national government.

Now, the practical aspects. Von der Leyen announced two concrete measures. The first: a European project, developed in collaboration with Kyiv, to establish defences against ballistic missiles. The second, more immediate: a new payment request has been received in respect of the 90 billion loan, ‘worth several billion euros’, which would cover Ukraine’s air defences, including the Patriot PAC-3 systems.

This is where things get complicated. The PAC-3s are the only truly effective interceptors against the Russian ballistic missiles striking Kyiv, but they are not European: the loan allows up to 35 per cent to be spent outside the EU, subject to case-by-case exemptions, and Paris has been pushing for weeks for that share to remain within Europe as much as possible. Ballistic missile defence has thus become the battleground on which the European contradiction is played out: should we buy American weapons straight away, or slowly build European ones? The project announced today is the long-term response to a problem that Ukraine is forced to face every night.

Meanwhile, in Wicklow, the foreign ministers meeting at the Gymnich under the Irish presidency were discussing the rest. High Representative Kaja Kallas said that the blacklist had been expanded with just a few additions, but that member states had proposed many more, and that each entry needed to be verified from a legal standpoint: this takes time. The political implication, however, is another: hybrid attacks across Europe, she observed, can “serve as a wake-up call” to countries that have not shown the same level of determination on this front. In other words: Russian pressure is doing the job that European diplomacy cannot manage on its own. The Russian ambassador has been summoned by the Commission and by many capitals.

As for the rest, the resistance remains the same as ever. Antonio Tajani reiterated that Italy is not opposed in principle to the use of frozen Russian assets, but that the issue is a legal one rather than a political one, and that this is precisely why the decision has never been taken. Johann Wadephul of Germany, arriving from the stricken capital, has made an uncomfortable request of his partners: some Member States still have air defence resources, and this needs to be discussed collectively. It is a request to hand over their own stocks – something nobody likes. This is why hybrid warfare works: because the response requires time, legal scrutiny and, almost always, unanimity.