Senior U.S. Air Force leaders in Europe say NATO allies are increasingly looking to participate in the development and employment of collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs), even as several of those same countries pursue their own indigenous fighter and drone programs. American commanders say they are looking forward to CCAs expanding the alliance’s overall capacity, and are already pushing for such systems to work together from the outset.

Speaking yesterday at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Symposium that TWZ is attending, Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa, and NATO’s Allied Air Command, and Chief Master Sgt. Joshua J. Wiener, USAFE-AFAFRICA’s command chief, discussed how the command is preparing for an eventual European role in the U.S. Air Force’s planned fleet of hundreds of CCAs.

The issue is particularly significant for USAFE, which operates a fraction of the fighter force it maintained in Europe during the Cold War, even as many of its NATO allies contend with shrinking fleets of crewed combat aircraft. This comes against a backdrop of deepening tensions with Russia and the emergence of new kinds of threats. Autonomous aircraft that can augment crewed fighters could provide the alliance with additional combat mass without requiring a corresponding increase in the number of crewed aircraft and personnel permanently based in Europe.

“I’m excited about what CCAs have in store for the Air Force,” Hinds said, pointing to recent comments from the Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, including the aim of having at least 500 CCAs in service by 2032.

He added that European interest in these kinds of platforms is already growing.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more interest from other nations inside Europe about what is America doing with CCAs and how they can join this party, if you will,” Hinds said.

Germany is “heavily involved,” he said, while Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are also showing interest.

In the case of Germany, we have previously explored how that country is looking to procure CCAs by 2029. Sweden, too, recently unveiled a concept for a high-end, stealthy CCA-type drone, while the Dutch are looking to become more closely alligned with U.S. Air Force CCA efforts.

USAFE is currently using two broad operational scenarios to explain to allies how CCAs could fit into NATO’s force structure.

The first is defensive. A CCA could operate as part of an integrated air and missile defense network, potentially engaging one-way attack drones or cruise missiles without the need for expensive crewed fighters.

The second is offensive. In that scenario, autonomous aircraft could help suppress or destroy integrated air defense systems and potentially attack fielded forces during an effort to repel a hostile incursion into NATO territory.

Allies are interested in both missions, Hinds said, and want the ability to incorporate CCAs into their own force designs. Interestingly, only yesterday, Anduril shared photos of its YFQ-44A Fury configured with air-to-ground weapons, underscoring the fact that the CCA could take on an air-to-ground role in the future in addition to its current air-to-air focus.

That kind of interest has already prompted work at the NATO level. Hinds pointed to a study by the Joint Air Power Competence Center, the alliance’s airpower think tank based in Kalkar, Germany, examining how NATO members could employ CCAs in a modular fashion, including issues such as sustainment, training, and exercises.

“It was a pretty long paper, but the nations wanted it,” Hinds said.

Initial experimentation is expected to take place in the United States, but European experimentation could follow, including by Sweden and potentially other NATO members.

At the same time, European countries are not simply waiting for an American CCA to arrive.

The United Kingdom has launched its own Storm Fighter CCA program. Germany is pursuing a separate loyal-wingman effort, while the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan are meanwhile jointly embarked on the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, which is intended to produce the Tempest next-generation crewed fighter and associated uncrewed systems.

The proliferation of national programs raises an obvious question: How does NATO prevent a growing fleet of autonomous aircraft from becoming a collection of incompatible national systems?

Hinds said the answer starts with commonality.

“The first and foremost thing is we want to strive for commonality,” he said. “Commonality means we don’t even have to worry about interoperability.”

Where common equipment is not possible, however, USAFE wants interoperability built into national systems from the beginning.

“Interoperability by design” is the preferred approach, Hinds said, with NATO data standards and other requirements incorporated before a system enters service rather than retrofitted later.

The good news for USAFE is that NATO already has extensive experience establishing common standards for interoperability, covering everything from tactics and procedures to communications, datalinks, weapons employment, and other technologies. That existing framework gives the alliance a foundation for integrating increasingly diverse national systems without requiring every member to field identical equipment.

Hinds did warn that some countries have previously acquired equipment that was not compatible with NATO systems, leaving them with the choice of paying to modify their own equipment or forcing the alliance to adapt its systems around it.

That problem becomes particularly important as autonomous aircraft are connected to increasingly complex sensor and weapons networks. Even more important is the requirement for a baseline command-and-control network for CCAs themselves, allowing different platforms to manage them seamlessly.

The ability to share and control CCAs across a complex battlespace is already emerging as both a major opportunity and a significant integration challenge. The U.S. Air Force and Navy, for example, have made clear that their respective CCAs are being developed with the ability to be controlled seamlessly across services, pointing toward a future in which autonomous aircraft need not remain tied to the service or platform that launched them.

Hinds described a potential kill chain in which an F-35 detects a target, passes the information to another node in the network, and a ground-based system operated by another NATO country ultimately launches the weapon.

In such an architecture, the aircraft, sensor, command-and-control network, and weapon do not necessarily have to belong to the same country.

As an example, Dutch F-35s, operating in Europe, have used a data-exchange system to transmit targeting coordinates to Israeli-made PULS (Precise and Universal Launch System) rocket artillery. The system, developed by Lockheed Martin is known as Keystone, and you can read more about it here.

USAFE is making “significant advances” in areas including cross-servicing, cross-loading, and cross-flying allied aircraft, Hinds said, all of which are intended to make multinational operations more seamless.

The same philosophy applies to weapons.

“We want to have all the fires, right? Whether it’s U.S. built or built inside European nations,” Hinds said.

That could prove increasingly important as European countries expand domestic production of missiles, drones, and other weapons alongside their aircraft programs.

The growth of GCAP and other European defense programs comes amid broader debate over how much Europe should depend on U.S. military equipment.

But Hinds rejected the idea that allies developing indigenous aircraft and autonomous systems necessarily signals a move away from American equipment.

“No, I don’t,” he said when asked whether allies were moving away from U.S. systems.

Instead, Hinds characterized the trend as an expansion of the transatlantic defense-industrial base.

Sweden was one example he cited. The country, which recently joined NATO, continues to produce new military equipment, including Gripen fighters, while those aircraft are already being operated by NATO members.

Swedish Gripens are currently leased to Hungary, and other countries are considering the aircraft, Hinds said.

The broader trend toward co-manufacturing and co-production is also something he welcomed.

“I’m seeing a lot of discussions about co-manufacturing and co-production, and I welcome those discussions as well,” Hinds said.

That approach could become increasingly important as NATO tries to expand its available combat power without relying exclusively on additional U.S.-built platforms.

For USAFE, the objective is to ensure that whatever aircraft NATO countries develop or purchase can plug into a common architecture, sharing data, receiving targeting information, drawing on common logistics networks, and contributing weapons effects across national boundaries.

For a U.S. Air Force command that has spent decades trying to cover Europe with far fewer fighters than it once had, hundreds of autonomous wingmen, whether American-built or allied, could provide a significant way to generate additional combat mass.

Senior U.S. Air Force officials are now working to ensure that the networking, weapons integration, logistics, and command-and-control architecture will be in place once those aircraft start to come online.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post How The USAF Is Preparing For European Allies To Join The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Club appeared first on TWZ.

Summary

• Europe still expects Turkey to pick a side. It has refused, and a post-Erdogan government would refuse too.
• Turkey has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that builds strategic autonomy from inside the Western system—because that is where its leverage comes from.
• Ankara has now tools of its own: troops abroad, a $10bn arms industry, partners in the global south, a geography everyone needs and channels to actors Europeans cannot reach.
• Yet it still needs NATO for its security, Europe to buy its exports and fund its factories, and Western technology to power its best weapons.
• Europe should stop trying to resolve the contradiction and learn to capitalise on it. It should deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie benefits to reciprocal obligations and withhold access when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests.

At the NATO summit he hosted in Ankara this July, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, gifted visiting heads of state a peculiar souvenir: a Turkish-made revolver, loaded with live ammunition. Several delegations were left wondering how one declares an unregistered firearm at customs.

It was a fitting emblem: a gift no one could quite accept, from an ally no one can quite place. At the summit itself, Turkey had never looked more central to the alliance. The Ankara Summit Declaration called for “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO”, reaffirmed Article 5 and placed European support for Ukraine at the heart of the alliance’s future. With NATO’s second-largest armed forces, an expanding defence industry and control of the Black Sea’s southern gateway, Turkey looked indispensable.

Look closer though and the picture is less tidy. This is still the NATO ally that bought Russia’s S-400 air-defence system, the EU candidate country whose membership negotiations have effectively collapsed, and the Black Sea power that arms Ukraine while maintaining extensive ties with Moscow. It is also, thanks to Erdogan’s close relationship with US president Donald Trump, an ally with unusual leverage over Washington at a time of strained transatlantic relations.

Turkey is neither drifting away from the West nor it is coming home. It has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that has learned to build strategic autonomy from inside the Western system rather than by leaving it. NATO still guarantees its security, Europe still buys its exports and funds its factories, and Western technology still powers its best weapons. But none of that buys alignment with Western preferences any more.

European policymakers have often treated this contradiction as a problem to solve. Their debate has revolved around whether Turkey can be “anchored” in the West or prevented from “drifting” towards Russia, China or the Middle East. Both approaches assume that Ankara must eventually pick a geopolitical home. It has chosen not to. Nor is this likely to change after Erdogan. A post-Erdogan government could be more democratic and predictable, but it would still be unlikely to abandon defence autonomy, regional activism or Turkey’s desire to balance among larger powers.

This paper argues that Europe should stop trying to resolve this contradiction and instead learn to capitalise on it. Turkey’s autonomy can frustrate Europeans, but it has also produced capabilities and relationships that Europe itself lacks. Its ability to maintain channels to Moscow helped it broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative and prisoner exchanges while continuing to arm Ukraine. Its military presence and political networks in Syria give it influence that few European states can match. Its growing defence industry could also make it an important partner in Europe’s rearmament.

It is true that the same autonomy sometimes works against European interests. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s assertiveness has brought it into direct conflict with EU member states Greece and Cyprus. Elsewhere, its balancing between Russia and the West has sometimes undermined European objectives.

The more useful question for Europe therefore is not whether Turkey can ever be a reliable ally, but when its autonomy serves Europe and when it cuts against it. The answer is managed interdependence: deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie the benefits of cooperation to clear and reciprocal obligations and withhold these benefits when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests. The aim is not obedience. It is to make Turkey’s autonomy pay for Europe more often than it costs.

Under Erdogan: An old instinct transformed

Turkey’s pursuit of greater foreign-policy autonomy did not start with Erdogan. Since the early republic, Turkey’s Western alignment has coexisted with suspicion of Western intentions.

The young republic pursued Westernisation after fighting a war of independence against European powers. It developed close ties with Soviet Russia after the war, but Soviet pressure later helped justify Turkey’s integration into the US-led Western bloc, culminating in NATO membership in 1952. But alliance membership did not end tensions with the West. The Cyprus crisis, the 1974 military intervention and the subsequent US arms embargo reinforced Turkey’s conviction that it could not always rely on its allies.

Erdogan inherited this impulse, but he also transformed it. Over more than two decades, his governments have expanded Turkey’s geographical ambitions and given them a neo-Ottomanist flavour at home. Turkey has become more willing to use force abroad and built the institutions needed to sustain a more autonomous foreign policy. Erdogan has also added a personal style of decision-making and an ideological vocabulary. His slogan “the world is bigger than five” calls for reform of the UN Security Council. The term “precious loneliness”, coined in 2013 by his then foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalim, casts Turkey’s regional isolation as the price of moral consistency.

This transformation unfolded in four broad phases:

European integration

In the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) first years in power, from 2002 to roughly the end of that decade, Erdogan and his government were celebrated in the West as reformists. They used the EU accession process to modernise the economy, pursue political reforms and curb the military’s influence over civilian politics. Ankara also expanded trade and diplomacy across its neighbourhood, presenting this activism as complementary to its Western orientation.

Closer ties with Europe accompanied an economic boom. Turkey’s GDP rose from roughly $241bn in 2002 to $775bn in 2008, while GDP per capita tripled. Foreign investment surged after accession talks opened in 2005, from about $900m in 2002-04 to nearly $12bn a year in 2005-08. EU member states accounted for roughly three-quarters of inflows by 2008.

Regional ambitions and civilisational mission

From the late 2000s through the Arab uprisings, Ankara became more ambitious in its neighbourhood. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine reflected a growing belief that Turkey’s history, location and political model gave it a distinctive regional role. Economic growth and mediation underpinned this confidence, while construction companies, television dramas, Turkish Airlines, diplomats, religious institutions and development agencies extended the country’s soft power.

However, the Syrian civil war, Egypt’s military coup and the regional backlash against the Arab uprisings upended this strategy. Soft power gave way increasingly to hard power and regional rivalry.

“Precious loneliness”

The decisive turn came between 2015 and 2020. The collapse of the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a failed coup attempt of July 2016 fed a sense of geopolitical isolation and a more combative foreign policy. As Turkey grew more authoritarian, with executive power consolidated in the presidency, the country launched several external military operations in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and expanded its overseas military presence across the Middle East. It also cultivated closer economic and defence ties with Russia to reduce dependence on the US and Europe, both of which were becoming increasingly concerned about Turkey’s democratic backsliding and regional activism.

Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 systems in 2017 became the clearest symbol of this rupture. It led to Turkey’s removal from the F-35 programme—the US-led fighter-jet project for which Turkish firms were supplying components—in 2019 and to American sanctions in 2020. This purchase showed that Ankara was prepared to defy its allies when it believed core security interests were at stake.

Anti-Western sentiment rose significantly during this period. Many Turks blamed the US for the failed coup attempt and for supporting Kurdish forces in Syria affiliated with the PKK. The post-coup crackdown, along with the 2017 constitutional referendum, helped create a national security state and concentrated decision-making even more in the presidency.

Military interventions in Syria and elsewhere during this period also created their own momentum. The armed forces, intelligence services, defence companies and the state bureaucracy acquired the skills and experience to sustain overseas operations, cooperate with non-state partners and convert military involvement into diplomatic leverage.

Transactional re-embedding

By the end of 2020, Ankara concluded that its assertive posture had become counterproductive—it had alienated Western allies and Middle Eastern governments alike, thereby helping create an anti-Turkey alignment across multiple fronts. Intensifying great power rivalry and the fragmentation of the West also made Turkish leaders more anxious about being left out in the cold in a tumultuous world. The recalibration was also economic: a currency crisis at the end of 2020 left Ankara in acute need of external capital—Western and Gulf alike—and de-escalation on both fronts was the price of access to it.

From 2021, Ankara therefore sought to repair ties with former regional rivals, from Saudi Arabia to Greece, and pursued a pragmatic reset with Europe and America—while preserving its autonomy.

Turkey’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured this shift. Ankara condemned the invasion, supplied Kyiv with drones that proved highly effective early on, refused to recognise Moscow’s annexations, and invoked Montreux’s wartime provisions to close the Straits to belligerents’ warships, which mainly constrained Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It saved its neutrality for the economic sphere, declining to join Western sanctions and casting itself as mediator, keeping Moscow close.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House created another opportunity to reboot ties with the Western system. Erdogan and Trump share a disdain for liberal Europe and a preference for flexible, transactional and personalised diplomacy. Close ties between the two presidents and their inner circles also facilitated dialogue on Gaza, Caucasus, Ukraine and Syria, with a surprising degree of alignment on many of these files.

Ankara increasingly saw its military leverage and geography as the basis for strategic autonomy—a foreign policy built on cultivating ties across rival centres of power so that no single relationship became indispensable and none foreclosed another. It sought closer defence-industrial ties with European states without abandoning its domestic production. It normalised relations with Gulf monarchies while retaining military or political networks in Libya, Syria, Palestine and Somalia. It renewed dialogue with the EU while prioritising bilateral ties with individual member states. Even as a NATO member, it flirted with membership of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

In August 2026, Turkey joined Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement—a trilateral mutual-defence pact dubbed in the media as a “Muslim NATO” that commits the three states to Article 5-like security guarantees. Building on a 2025 Saudi-Pakistani accord, the pact signals Turkey’s ambition to make regional security arrangements of its own, even as it remains in NATO. However, the new pact so far lacks the integrated command, joint planning and shared threat perception that would make it a functioning alliance rather than a political declaration.

The Mecca agreement aligns with Turkey’s ambition to keep a foot in several camps. Many in the country’s ruling elite see a larger role in the Middle East and on the world stage as Ankara’s natural destiny. Meanwhile, where previous US presidents saw Turkey’s regional ambitions as disruptive, the Trump administration came to view Ankara as a useful and capable regional partner.

Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan has not travelled a simple path from pro-Westernism to anti-Westernism and back again. Ankara has rebuilt its foreign policy repeatedly around the needs of the ruling far-right nationalist coalition at home and what a changing international order permits abroad. The re-embedding since 2021 is no exception: it did not reverse Turkey’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, but relocated it. Ankara now seeks that autonomy from inside Western structures, because that is where the leverage lies.

Beyond Erdogan: Different versions of autonomy

Although Erdogan’s dominance at home is a reality, in 2024, the opposition alliance led by the Republican People’s Party swept local elections, taking Istanbul, Ankara and most major cities—its best showing since 1979. The following March, Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoglu, the opposition’s presidential candidate and the man most likely to beat Erdogan, was arrested on corruption charges widely seen as politically motivated. Two decades of Erdogan rule have narrowed political space, but they have not closed it.

So what would change in foreign policy in a post-Erdogan Turkey? A successor could reset relations with the West and rebuild institutions. But a new government would not rethink the fundamentals—that Turkey must keep its freedom of action, arm itself and depend on no single power. Those assumptions no longer rest on one man’s decisions. They rest on an elite consensus, underpinned by a domestic defence industry, bases across three continents and Turkey’s own geography—and reinforced by a fragmenting international order that makes autonomy look like a necessity.

Public sentiment also seems to embrace an independent foreign policy. Turks might be split over Erdogan and domestic governance, but they largely agree on autonomy and avoiding unconditional alignment with any single outside power. Ukraine makes this point clearly. In a 2022 Kadir Has University survey, 52% of respondents wanted Turkey to remain impartial and 50.7% wanted it to mediate. Only 21.5% backed sanctioning Russia and 20.8% backed supporting it. In spring 2024 polling by Pew Research Center, a plurality of Turks (46%) said Turkey was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine.

The Iran war reveals a similar picture. A MetroPoll survey in March 2026 found that 68.1% wanted Turkey to remain neutral between Iran and the US, compared with 22.6% favouring support for Iran and 2.1% for the US and Israel. Neutrality won among the voters of every major party. This was no affection for the mullahs; rather, Turks fear a collapsing Iran would send refugees across the border, give the Kurdish insurgency new momentum, disrupt the Turkish economy and embolden Israel.

The argument at home is therefore about the methods, not autonomy itself. The opposition parties criticise the AKP-MHP government’s rhetoric and self-inflicted isolation, yet they treat maritime jurisdiction, the Aegean and Cyprus as national issues. In the 2022 Kadir Has survey, half or more of every major party’s supporters named maritime jurisdiction and the militarisation of Aegean islands among Turkey’s main problems with Greece.

A 2022 Carnegie study that interviewed opposition foreign-policy figures found the same. Most favoured repairing relations with the US and EU, restoring the foreign ministry’s authority, reducing personal diplomacy, and resolving the S-400 dispute to reopen the path to the F-35 programme. They also wanted no confrontation with Russia, no concessions on Turkey’s maritime claims, and no American weapons for Syria’s Kurds.

A post-Erdogan Turkey would therefore be a different kind of embedded outsider, not a former one. Democratisation and a return to institutional decision-making would make Turkey more predictable. But Ankara would still likely pursue diversified partnerships, its own arms industry, regional influence and the ability to say no to allies.

Turkey no longer treats the West as a complete strategic home or a reliable guarantor of its interests. Yet Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf cannot replace the security, markets, technology and institutional ties it draws from NATO, Europe and America. Turkey thus hedges from the inside. Europe cannot end that, and no Turkish government would tolerate the attempt. Its only realistic aim is to keep the hedge bending westward.

What Turkey is embedded in

Turkey today is rarely described as a European power. Yet it is still a NATO member and, technically, an EU candidate. It is also a partner for Europe and the US on critical regional issues ranging from containment of Iran to counter-terrorism and support for Ukraine.

But Turkey’s Western embeddedness goes much deeper than institutions. Its economy, private sector, defence industry and society are tightly integrated with the West, particularly Europe. These connections constrain Turkish autonomy, but they also enable it: the markets, technology, capital and security relationships Turkey draws on to project power remain disproportionately Western.

Economic embeddedness: Europe as market and regulatory ecosystem

The EU remains the centre of gravity of the Turkish economy. The customs union, in force since 1996, goes far beyond an ordinary free-trade agreement. It removed tariffs and quantitative restrictions on industrial goods and required Turkey to align with important parts of EU customs, commercial, competition, intellectual-property and technical legislation.

The numbers remain striking despite political tensions. The EU accounts for 42.7% of Turkey’s goods exports and 35.3% of its imports, with volume reaching €217.6bn in 2025. Services trade added €42.1bn in 2024.

Trade volumes understate the depth of integration. Turkish factories are embedded in European production networks, supplying the automotive, appliance, machinery, textile and electronics industries while relying on European capital goods, technology, standards and intermediate inputs. By mid-2025, Turkey reported that it had aligned 24,597 national standards with European standards, a harmonisation rate of 99.5% with the European Committee for Standardisation and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation systems.

European capital has been equally important. Turkey received roughly $200bn in foreign-equity inflows between 2003 and 2025, with around 60% originating in the EU. The West as a whole, including the US, UK and Canada, supplies roughly 70% of Turkey’s foreign direct investment.

Ankara has tried to diversify, towards Russia, the Gulf and, above all, China. It joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, applied to BRICS in 2024 and courted Chinese manufacturing, including electric vehicle manufacturer BYD, whose $1bn plant in Turkey will benefit from access to the EU market. But China has not emerged as an alternative to the EU. Chinese firms treat Turkey as high-risk and stayed out of the top 20 sources of foreign investment in 2024. Turkey runs a large trade deficit with Beijing and competes with it for influence in Africa and Central Asia, while Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur population remains a source of tension.

No partner has been able to match Europe’s market, investment stock and dense supply chains. Ankara’s economic autonomy therefore has limits. It can diversify eastwards, but the capital, technology and markets on which much of its industry depends remain Western. That dependence is sharpened by chronic macroeconomic fragility—high inflation, a weak lira and reliance on external financing—which has repeatedly forced Ankara to seek Gulf and Western capital, setting a hard ceiling on its autonomy.

This dependence also comes with a political irritation. Through the customs union, Turkey aligns with relevant EU regulations but has no say in making them. The agreement is also outdated, excluding services, digital commerce, public procurement, agriculture and climate regulation. The European Commission proposed negotiations to modernise it in 2016, but the European Council has yet to approve a mandate.

This captures a contradiction in Turkish foreign policy. Ankara seeks privileged access to the EU economy while demanding political distance from Brussels. Yet much of its industrial power, export capacity and ability to attract investment still depends on its position at the edge of Europe.

Security embeddedness: Inside NATO’s architecture

Turkey’s security ties with the West are deep. A NATO member since 1952, Turkey has the alliance’s second-largest military after the US and critical infrastructure including the Incirlik air base, where US nuclear weapons are widely believed to be stored; the Kurecik early-warning radar system that covers the Middle East; the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir; and forward bases at Konya and Istanbul. Turkey and its territory are therefore woven into a NATO security architecture that stretches from the Middle East to Europe’s eastern flank.

Despite the on-and-off crises with America and a more ambivalent policy towards Russia than most European allies, Turkey’s relationship with NATO is not dormant. Not only has Ankara recently hosted the NATO summit, it has also continued to support NATO’s collective defence missions, including participating in the Baltic Air Policing in 2006 and 2021. After the summit, Turkey agreed to do so again in 2026, even as it maintains cordial relations with Moscow. And while Turkey has worked hard to reduce its military dependence on its allies, many of its high-end programmes still depend on Western engines, components, certification, financing and export access.

Yet embeddedness has not meant deference or loyalty. For example, when Sweden and Finland sought to join NATO, Ankara used its veto in the alliance as leverage—delaying ratification until it had extracted commitments on the PKK and, from the US, approval of a major F-16 sale. Turkey capitalises on its position in NATO as much as it upholds the alliance.

Social and political embeddedness: A diaspora and a stalled accession

Turkey’s political relationship with Europe is weakest precisely where its institutional ties are deepest. Ankara applied to the European Economic Community in 1959, signed the Ankara Agreement in 1963, became an EU candidate in 1999 and opened accession talks in 2005. Those negotiations have now effectively collapsed: only 16 of 35 chapters were opened and just one closed before the process froze. In 2018, the EU General Affairs Council noted that accession talks had come to a standstill, stopping short of formal suspension, but freezing the opening or closing of any new chapters. In 2025, the European Parliament reaffirmed this, on the grounds that Turkey’s strategic importance cannot offset its democratic backsliding and divergence from European norms.

Yet neither side has formally ended the process. Turkey remains a candidate, receives pre-accession funding and participates in EU programmes like Erasmus and Horizon Europe. It is also in the European Political Community and has expressed a desire to be part of a future European security architecture.

Turkey’s European embeddedness is also demographic. Since the 1960s, migration has created communities whose lives span Turkey and Europe. At the end of 2024, around two million Turkish citizens held valid residence permits in the EU, excluding naturalised citizens and second generation Turks born in Europe. Germany alone is home to about 2.6 million people of Turkish background, the country’s largest single-origin immigrant community. Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden also have sizeable Turkish communities.

Turkey’s European diaspora connects Turkish cities and regions to European labour markets, schools, businesses, media and political parties. They also make Europe an arena of Turkish domestic politics: governments and opposition parties campaign among overseas voters, while disputes about nationalism, religion, Kurdish identity and democratic rights spill into European public life. Europe is therefore not just an external actor but an extension of the political debate in Ankara.

Turkey’s political estrangement from the EU can also obscure the continued attraction Europe holds for many Turks. In a spring 2025 survey commissioned by the EU delegation to Turkey, 58% said they would support EU membership in a referendum and 66% said membership would bring more advantages than disadvantages. Visa-free travel, higher living standards and employment opportunities were the most frequently cited benefits. Similarly, Pew found in 2024 that 56% supported EU membership, rising to 66% among those under 35. Polls show mixed motivations for supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU, with younger, urban and educated Turks consistently aspiring to European legal and political standards even as faith in accession has eroded.

Migration creates another form of interdependence between Turkey and Europe. Turkey hosts a large refugee population and sits on major migration routes from the Middle East and Asia into Europe. European governments have relied on Turkey as a buffer, most explicitly through the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal. Meanwhile, Ankara has periodically used refugee flows as political leverage, but it has also come to rely on EU funds to manage migration. Neither side can manage migration sustainably without the other.

The instruments of autonomy

Turkey’s distinctive position among middle powers lies not only in its aspiration to act independently but in the tools it has built to do so. It is one of the few middle powers that treats military force as a routine instrument rather than an exception, and the only one that has turned the resulting hardware into a diplomatic currency.

Five tools carry Turkish influence abroad: an expeditionary military, a strong arms industry, a geography that charges rent, an apparatus for soft power and a habit of brokering other people’s wars. Each has widened Ankara’s room for manoeuvre, but each also reveals the limits of Turkish autonomy.

An expeditionary military

What changed under the AKP was less Turkey’s appetite for military activism abroad than how it used force. Before the Arab uprisings, Turkish deployments took place largely within NATO and UN frameworks. But over the past decade, Ankara has increasingly acted unilaterally to advance its own security interests, using forward bases, long-term deployments and partnership with local armed actors. Syria, Libya, Iraq and the Caucasus region each show a version of the method.

In Syria, four cross-border operations between 2016 and 2020 created a belt of Turkish-controlled territory in the north, governed through the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. Ankara’s presence also helped preserve an opposition-controlled enclave in Idlib, from which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged and eventually overthrew Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024. Turkey has since become the most important external backer of Syria’s new government, signing a defence accord in August 2025 to train, equip and advise the army Damascus is rebuilding out of former rebel factions. Ankara’s leverage nonetheless has limits: it has not yet converted this partnership into permanent bases beyond the north, constrained by Israeli red lines and Damascus’s own wariness of overdependence.

Turkey has similarly intervened militarily in Libya since 2020, when it helped prevent warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces overrunning the internationally recognised government in Tripoli. The intervention has shifted the military balance and entrenched a Turkish security presence, which Ankara subsequently converted into economic and political leverage—against the will of competitors like Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and the UAE. However, Turkey has recently repaired relations with Egypt and opened channels to actors in eastern Libya.

In Iraq, Ankara’s footprint has proved more durable, driven primarily by its campaign against the PKK. A network of forward operating bases across the north has hardened into a de-facto security belt along the border. And despite renewed efforts to resolve the Kurdish question—such as PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s 2025 call to disarm and the party’s subsequent dissolution—Ankara is unlikely to dismantle that presence in the near future.

Beyond those, Turkey maintains bases in northern Cyprus, facilities in Qatar, and a training base in Mogadishu. Turkey’s regional footprint today is far larger than it was two decades ago.

Defence

Turkey’s expanding defence industry provides the material foundation for this more assertive foreign policy. Once a buyer of US weapons systems, Turkey has spent the last three decades building its capacity to produce a range of high- and low-end systems, from armed drones and navy vessels to armoured vehicles, missiles, tanks and artillery shells.

Defence and aerospace exports reached $10.05bn in 2025, a dramatic hike from $248m in 2002. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Turkey the 11th-largest exporter of major arms for 2021-25, with five Turkish firms—MKE, ASELSAN, Turkish Aerospace, Baykar and Roketsan—entering its global top 100 in 2025. Many of their systems have been battle-tested in Karabakh, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. In the early phase of the Ukraine war, Baykar’s TB2 “Bayraktar” drones gained particular prominence and have since become a symbol of Turkey’s defence-industrial rise. This transformation in the defence industrial base has given Ankara capabilities and relationships in Africa, Central Asia and Europe it did not possess two decades ago.

Greater autonomy, however, is not self-sufficiency. Turkish officials boast that the domestic share of defence production has risen from about 20% in the early 2000s to roughly 80%. But that figure conceals continued dependency on imported technology in propulsion, power transmission, advanced materials and aviation components. For example, Turkey’s flagship fifth-generation fighter-jet, the KAAN, relies on imported engines, as its indigenous turbofan is still in development. Altay tanks entered production with a South Korean power pack, pending integration of the domestic BATU engine and transmission. Imported engines and export licences have also complicated both production and sales of systems such as the Firtina howitzer.

One way Turkey has sought to overcome these constraints has been by embedding itself into the European defence base. In 2025, Baykar and Italy’s Leonardo formed LBA Systems, a fifty-fifty joint venture headquartered in Italy to build unmanned systems, while Baykar outright bought Italian aerospace company Piaggio Aerospace, with its production lines inside the EU. Also in 2025, Turkish Aerospace agreed to supply Spain with Hürjet trainer jets in a €2.6bn deal, which includes substantial production in Spain. These are co-production arrangements inside European supply chains.

Turkey’s defence-industrial autonomy is therefore uneven. It is strongest where companies have accumulated design experience and domestic supply chains, and weakest where production depends on complex propulsion or externally controlled components. And while the industry’s rise has reduced the ability of any single country or supplier to block Turkish military action, its most ambitious programmes still depend on Western technology, certification, finance and markets. This captures the logic of the embedded outsider. Turkey has built greater autonomy not by leaving Western industrial networks, but by using domestic production, offset agreements and selective partnerships to improve its bargaining position within them.

Connectivity

Ankara has not created its own geography, but it has learned to monetise it. Turkey sits between Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, astride important trade and energy routes. It is crisscrossed by several energy pipelines despite producing little energy itself. And regional disorder only makes Turkey’s location more valuable.

Azerbaijani oil and gas cross Anatolia through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor. Russian gas reaches Turkey and south-eastern Europe through Blue Stream and TurkStream, while Iranian gas enters from the east. Expanding liquefied natural gas terminals give Ankara access to seaborne supplies from America, Qatar and elsewhere.

Turkey has also invested in logistics and connectivity. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway connects Turkey to the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor, linking Central Asia and China westwards. Ankara regards the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which bypasses Turkey, as a geopolitical challenge. It has instead backed the $17bn Development Road, linking Iraq’s al-Faw Grand Port through Turkey to Europe. Instability in the Strait of Hormuz has given a boost to this project. This eastward reach also has an institutional home: Turkey leads the Organization of Turkic States, a bloc spanning Azerbaijan and Central Asia that hopes to turn the corridor’s unique geography and ethnic ties into standing political influence.

Soft power

Turkey’s ambitions are also supported by an extensive cultural and diplomatic network. It now operates 255 diplomatic missions, up from 163 in 2002, with the number of African embassies rising from 12 to 44 in this period.

In addition to its diplomatic corps, there is the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Yunus Emre Institute and the state broadcaster TRT World. All of those are active in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Turkish Airlines has also become an unusually effective instrument for connectivity and visibility. The Antalya Diplomacy Forum now serves as a flagship venue to showcase Turkey’s ambition to convene international actors, modelled after the Munich Security Conference, India’s Raisina Dialogue and Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club.

Perhaps Turkey’s most effective soft power, however, is one the state neither built nor controls. In 2024, Turkish producers exported more than 300 television dramas to over 150 countries, earning over $500m a year and reaching close to a billion viewers. They have made Turkey’s language, cities and lifestyle familiar across the Balkans, Middle East, Latin America and parts of Africa. The state has since moved to harness this success: TRT’s own historical epics carry a more explicit neo-Ottoman message abroad, while per–episode export subsidies introduced in 2026 aim to bend the commercial sector toward promoting Turkey’s image.

Meanwhile, humanitarian aid, education, religion, media, commerce and defence partnerships reinforce the conservative government’s “civilisational” narrative, placing Turkey at the centre of a wider historical and cultural world. Turkey’s overseas network promotes Palestinian rights and positions Turkey as a natural leader of Muslim nations. Erdogan’s slogan that “the world is bigger than five”, referring to the UN Security Council, captures this ambition.

Yet Turkey’s economic fragility sets a hard limit on its ambitions. Inflation peaked at 85.5% in October 2022 and, despite the return to orthodox monetary policy after the 2023 election, remained above 32% in mid-2026. A volatile lira and persistent inflation make it harder to finance reconstruction in Syria, sustain long-term influence in Africa and compete with other powers. Technological dependence, weak institutions and personalised decision-making reinforce these constraints.

Mediation

Mediation became a signature of Turkish foreign policy in the mid-2000s. Under the Davutoglu doctrine of “zero problems with neighbours”, Ankara presented itself as a country able to speak simultaneously to the West, the West’s regional adversaries and the Muslim world. Ankara facilitated indirect talks between Syria and Israel in 2008, engaged in Balkan diplomacy and, alongside Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel-swap with Iran in 2010. Also that year, Turkey and Finland launched a UN Friends of Mediation group.

That premise collapsed with the Arab uprisings. Ankara’s support for Syrian opposition and the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its feuds with the Arab Gulf monarchies, Egypt and Israel, made Turkey increasingly party to the region’s conflicts rather than a neutral mediator. As it expanded its regional entanglements, the nature of its mediation efforts changed. From 2017, Ankara worked with Russia and Iran through the Astana process on ceasefires and de-escalation deals in Syria even while backing the opposition on the ground. In Libya in 2020, Turkey participated in the Berlin process as a stakeholder while its troops were deployed in Tripoli. Ankara was not mediating because it stood outside these conflicts, but because it was embedded in them.

From the 2020s, Turkey’s mediation rested on a different foundation. Its leverage came from its higher international profile and its unique access to regional conflicts, such as in Gaza and Ukraine.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has hosted several rounds of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials, facilitated prisoner exchanges and, with the UN, brokered the Black Sea grain deal in 2022. None ended the war, but the grain agreement kept a critical maritime trade route open for almost a year and demonstrated the value of Ankara’s working relationships with both Moscow and Kyiv.

In the final round of negotiations leading to the Gaza ceasefire, Turkey used its relationship with Hamas to convince the armed group to sign the US-brokered agreement with a specific clause for disarmament. Ankara provided political guarantees that helped bring Hamas to the table, but its involvement also led Israel to veto a greater Turkish role in a multinational peacekeeping force in Gaza.

Turkey’s comparative advantage in mediation therefore does not come from neutrality but access. Its willingness to maintain relationships across geopolitical divides can make Ankara frustrating for its Western allies. But it is also precisely what allows Turkey to reach actors that Europeans and Americans sometimes cannot.

What it means for Europe

For Europe, the instruments described above could be assets or liabilities, depending on where and how Turkey uses them. The three case studies that follow trace that variation. In Ukraine and Syria, autonomy generates outcomes Europe wants—grain corridors, prisoner exchanges, a check on Russian and Iranian influence—that a more compliant ally could not have delivered. In the eastern Mediterranean, the same autonomy cuts the other way, pitting Turkey directly against two member states. Together, the three cases leave Europe with a question: how to channel an autonomy it can influence but cannot switch off.

Ukraine: Pro-Kyiv, but not anti-Moscow

Ankara’s position is often summarised as “pro-Ukraine without being anti-Russia”—a formulation that frustrates European allies but has proved durable. Turkey recognises Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and built a substantial defence relationship with Kyiv before the full-scale invasion, selling it Bayraktar TB2 drones and agreeing joint production. It was also among the few NATO states willing to provide strategically significant military technology before February 2022.

At the same time, Ankara refused to join Western sanctions, kept extensive ties with Moscow and described Russia’s aggression in cautious language. After the invasion, it invoked the wartime provisions of the Montreux Convention, closing the Straits to belligerent warships—a move that limited escalation while also constraining NATO’s naval access.

Ankara’s access to both capitals produced results, though not a ceasefire. In 2022, Turkey brokered the Black Sea grain deal with the UN and has facilitated several prisoner exchanges. But it has also been a key conduit for trade with Russia, the flipside of its balancing act.

Ukraine shows the embedded outsider at work: Turkey supports the principles and institutions that protect its own security while reserving the right to diverge from the broader Western strategy. While this balancing is self-interested, it has at times served Ukrainian or European interests.

Syria: Access without capital

Syria offers the clearest demonstration of Turkey’s embedded-outsider role in practice. After more than a decade of cross-border operations, troop deployments, intelligence work and local patronage, Ankara entered the post-Assad period with leverage few external powers could match: close access to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, influence over armed groups in the north, control of border routes, a substantial military presence, and a strong hand in debates about reconstruction and refugee returns. Assad’s fall also weakened Turkey’s rivals, Iran and Russia, and opened up space for Ankara to expand its political and economic influence.

Yet Syria remains a work in progress. Turkey met its core security objective—blocking a PKK-linked autonomous zone along its border—and deepened its leverage in Damascus, but it has neither established a new order nor reaped the economic benefits of its patronage.

Syria’s battered economy is one constraint. Ankara can reopen trade routes, repair energy links and position its companies for reconstruction, but it cannot finance Syria’s recovery alone; that will depend on external capital, European and Gulf support and governance reforms.

Israel is another problem. It remains deeply suspicious of an enlarged Turkish role and has attacked sites earmarked for Turkish military installations. Turkey, in turn, views Israeli support for Syria’s Druze and Kurdish minorities as an obstacle to state consolidation. The Turkish-Israeli rivalry, sharpened since 2024 by Gaza and in the contest for Syria’s new government, increasingly structures the regional order into rival camps: Ankara’s Sunni grouping on one side and an Israel-Greece-Cyprus bloc on the other.

Syria is therefore where Turkey’s embedded-outsider status could pay off most—and where its limits show most clearly. Ankara has access, military leverage and relationships Europe cannot easily reproduce, but not the financial resources and institutional capacity to rebuild Syria on its own. Its ability to shepherd the transition depends, paradoxically, on the very Western relationships it has sought to loosen.

The eastern Mediterranean: Autonomy that backfires

The eastern Mediterranean shows the other side of bounded autonomy. Turkish hydrocarbon exploration in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus triggered EU sanctions in 2020, and contested maritime claims between the three countries remain. This is potentially the most dangerous flashpoint in Turkey’s relations with the EU.

The dispute predates Erdogan. It is rooted in the unresolved conflict in Cyprus and competing interpretations of maritime jurisdiction in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Ankara rejects Greek claims that islands close to the Anatolian coast should generate extensive maritime zones, and resists any arrangement it sees as restricting Turkey’s access to the open sea. Successive rounds of UN-led negotiations—including a 2004 referendum and the 2017 talks at Crans-Montana—have failed to produce a settlement.

These longstanding trilateral disagreements have sprawled into a regional confrontation. Offshore gas exploration around Cyprus has repeatedly stoked tensions over the past decade, while closer defence and energy ties between Cyprus, Greece and Israel have reinforced Ankara’s sense of encirclement.

Tensions peaked in 2020, when Turkish and Greek vessels came close to direct conflict. The EU subsequently imposed targeted sanctions linked to Turkish drilling activities. At that time, the German former chancellor Angela Merkel became personally involved in shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Athens and helped avert a military confrontation. But since Merkel left office, no European leader has had the same standing with Erdogan or mounted a comparable sustained effort to address the underlying political dispute.

As long as Cyprus remains divided, Ankara is unlikely to abandon its insistence that Nicosia cannot unilaterally develop the island’s hydrocarbon resources without agreement on how Turkish Cypriots will share in them. Ankara is also unlikely to accept any Greek extension of territorial waters from six to twelve nautical miles in the Aegean—a step the Turkish parliament declared a casus belli in 1995—on grounds that it would sharply curtail its own access to the open sea. That suggests a limit to punitive conditionality by the EU. Targeted sanctions may raise the price of Turkish actions, but by themselves they are unlikely to change Ankara’s position on an issue it regards as a core national interest.

But Europe has not yet seriously tested sustained diplomacy aimed at the source of the dispute. The EU should invest political capital in a renewed Cyprus settlement process, working alongside the UN and encouraging a negotiated arrangement between the island’s two communities. It should not approach the conflict simply as a dispute between a member state and an outside power. The EU cannot easily present itself as a neutral actor when Cyprus is itself a member state, but it can provide incentives, pressure Nicosia into talks, and use diplomatic weight and the prospect of deeper Turkey-EU integration, with security guarantees for Cyprus, to support a settlement. Without progress on Cyprus, the island will remain a perennial obstacle to a more functional relationship between Turkey and Europe.

***

The three case studies show the uses and limits of Turkish autonomy. In Ukraine, Ankara worked both sides without breaking with either, creating access Europe could use. In Syria, Turkish power created leverage but not the resources to consolidate it. In the eastern Mediterranean, autonomy produced confrontation, while European sanctions contained some of the immediate costs without resolving the political dispute that generated them.

A European strategy for the embedded outsider

Europe’s Turkey policy swings between two illusions: that Ankara can be brought back to the Western alignment of the 1990s, or that it is lost and can only be contained. A country this entangled with Europe yet so determined to act alone fits neither.

The alternative is managed interdependence. It begins from two facts: first, Turkish autonomy is here to stay—no future government will return to unquestioned Western alignment; second, autonomy stops well short of independence—Turkey still relies on NATO for ultimate security, Europe for markets, capital, technology and regulation, and America for advanced defence cooperation and regional deterrence.

Europe should use that dependence without trying to eliminate Turkish autonomy. It should make Western cooperation valuable enough that Ankara keeps its forces interoperable, honours common rules and avoids partnerships that damage allied security.

There are limits to this policy. Ankara is unlikely to agree to Greek or Cypriot maritime claims, but it could be open to a UN-led settlement or a deal dividing hydrocarbon resources. Europe should push for that instead of settling for the status quo, even at the cost of having to pressure Cyprus into a new framework or resumption of UN-led talks.

The reality is that European leverage on the eastern Mediterranean is limited, and punitive measures will not change the Turkish calculus. In order to build leverage, Europe first has to define a credible endgame in the conflict and try something new: positive engagement with Ankara aimed at a durable settlement to the frozen conflict. A good place to start would be a pan-Mediterranean conference, inviting Turkey, to set out the disputes and the case for diplomacy. Following that, the EU could work with the UN to push Cyprus and Turkey back to the table, either for a final settlement on Cyprus or a resource-sharing deal on hydrocarbons. 

On the broader agenda with Turkey, the EU should pursue separate, self-contained deals across defence, trade, regional security, migration and mobility. Cyprus can block some of these deals, but in the end can be persuaded by other member states to agree to a more pragmatic approach in return for security guarantees. Each deal should exchange concrete benefits for defined obligations with clear monitoring so that cooperation no longer rests on personal ties between leaders.

The return of Donald Trump somewhat complicates this strategy. Erdogan’s direct relationship with Washington can reduce the immediate cost of ignoring Brussels by giving Ankara another route into the Western system. But transatlantic uncertainty also cuts the other way. Turkey likes to hedge and understands that Trump’s America is a risky player—and that Europe is a good hedge against US volatility. As Europe assumes more responsibility for its own defence and Washington becomes less predictable, Turkey’s military capacity, geography and defence industry become more valuable to Europeans. The result is mutual leverage rather than European dependence alone. Ankara has alternatives to Brussels, but Europe also has assets—market access, industrial integration, finance and regulation—that Washington cannot replace.

Integrate Turkey into European defence

This is where Turkish and European interests overlap most obviously. Europe is rearming; Turkey has factories, a fast-growing arms industry and capabilities relevant to Europe’s eastern and southern flanks. Excluding Turkey entirely from emerging defence-industrial arrangements would be self-defeating.

Yet that is roughly what has happened. In 2025, the EU launched its most ambitious defence effort to date—ReArm Europe, including SAFE, a €150bn joint-procurement instrument. SAFE is open in principle to candidate countries such as Turkey, but deeper participation requires a separate bilateral agreement with the EU, and Turkey has yet to conclude one. Cyprus and Greece have made clear that they view such access through the prism of their own security disputes with Ankara, and this is another way unresolved conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean constrain Europe’s ability to draw Turkey more deeply into its emerging defence architecture.

Turkey should be let in. Europe should use the linkage constructively: greater Turkish access to European defence programmes should accompany sustained de-escalation with Greece and progress on Cyprus, rather than being treated either as an unconditional entitlement or as a permanent exclusion.

EU institutions and member states should pursue this at different levels. The Commission and Council should create pathways for Turkish participation in EU-level defence instruments where political and security conditions are met. Meanwhile, individual member states should expand bilateral procurement, co-production and supply-chain partnerships with Turkish firms on a project-specific basis. Access should be conditional: tied to end-use guarantees, IP protection, sanctions compliance and limits on transferring jointly developed technology to third countries. Kept modular and reversible, such projects give Ankara a stake in interoperability and give Europe access to Turkish capacity without waving away its political and security concerns.

Modernise the customs union

Economic interdependence is Europe’s strongest lever and Turkey’s main reason to stay close. Yet the existing customs union is outdated and ill-suited to a world of supply chain fragmentation, US tariffs, Chinese overcapacity, digital trade and climate regulation. It covers goods and little else—no services, no digital trade, no public procurement and almost no agriculture—besides having weak dispute mechanisms.

Modernisation of the customs union should be at the centre of the Turkey-EU relationship. An expanded agreement would deepen supply-chain integration, attract investment, support green and digital transitions, and pull Turkish regulation closer to that of the EU. And by helping the EU’s industrial competitiveness, it would strengthen its hand against both China and America.

Modernisation should proceed in stages, with access to new sectors tied to measurable compliance and stronger dispute settlement. The objective is not more trade for its own sake. It is to make the dependence run in both directions.

Build coalitions in the neighbourhood

Turkey is now central to many crises in the Middle East, and there is room for Ankara and Brussels to work together more closely. But this does not have to be a single regional bargain. A more realistic model is a portfolio of issue-based coalitions.

In Iraq, both want stronger state institutions, better energy and transport links, reduced dependence on the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian-backed militias out of the military and politics. In Lebanon, both want functioning state institutions and reconstruction while containing escalation with Israel. In Libya and Somalia, maritime security, migration, energy and political stabilisation all provide areas for cooperation.

In the South Caucasus, Europe should continue to support Turkish-Armenian normalisation, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the east-west transit corridor. On Iran, Ankara’s rivalry with Tehran and diplomatic access to it are useful: both Europe and Turkey want neither an Iranian hegemon nor an Iranian collapse.

Cooperate on migration

The 2016 migration deal reduced a complicated relationship to cash for border control, punctuated by political threats. Europe treats Turkey as a wall; Turkey periodically opens a door in it to make a point. This has delivered no more than short-term containment.

A more durable framework should distribute responsibilities more evenly between Turkey and Europe. It should combine joint border management with sustained refugee protection, greater EU financial support for Turkish municipalities and host communities and expanded resettlement from Turkey to EU member states. Any large-scale return to Syria should be voluntary and depend on improvements in security, housing, documentation, ability to earn a living and protection from persecution. Achieving that will require the EU to do more than simply leave returns for Turkey to manage: it should jointly monitor conditions on the ground, while helping finance reconstruction of civilian infrastructure Syria needs to improve those conditions.

The EU should also make legal travel easier for Turkish citizens: faster visa processing for students, academics, businesspeople, and families, alongside expanded educational and professional exchanges. The point is to replace money-for-containment with better mobility, giving Turkish citizens a reason to care about Europe while reducing Ankara’s ability to weaponise migration.

Make conditionality targeted, not existential

Managed interdependence cannot ignore Turkey’s authoritarian turn. Politicised courts, jailed political opponents and hollowed-out institutions render commercial deals less reliable and foreign policy less predictable.

But Europe’s response has often produced the opposite of what it intended. Keeping Turkey at political distance has not reversed democratic backsliding. It has instead weakened constituencies invested in European integration, reduced the EU’s influence over domestic reform and recast the relationship as an increasingly transactional exchange between governments. The lesson is not to abandon conditionality, but to use it more precisely and consistently.

Europe’s experience with Viktor Orban’s Hungary offers a partial lesson. It demonstrates the value of linking material benefits to specific institutional and rule-of-law conditions, and that different policy areas can be treated separately. But Turkey is not an EU member. It has an independent, regional presence, relationships beyond Europe and no obligation to submit to European courts. The EU’s leverage therefore is much narrower.

Conditionality should therefore be specific, proportionate and tied to the area of cooperation concerned. Instead of making the broader relationship contingent on an open-ended judgment about Turkey’s political trajectory, the EU should tie access to particular benefits to transparent and measurable commitments. Serious rule-of-law violations might affect access to EU financing or progress in areas requiring high levels of regulatory and judicial trust. Coercive actions abroad might trigger restrictions on particular defence-industrial partnerships or targeted measures against the individuals and entities responsible. Measures should have clearly defined triggers and, equally importantly, a clear route to reversal when the triggering behaviour stops.

This approach also requires distinguishing between the Turkish government and Turkish society. Measures intended to constrain the government should not unnecessarily restrict students, researchers, businesses, municipalities or civil society organisations whose interaction with Europe sustains the social foundations of the relationship. Visa access, academic cooperation, municipal partnerships and civil society programmes should therefore be insulated, as far as possible, from political disputes between Ankara and European governments.

Conditionality also has limits when disputes concern interests that Ankara defines as fundamental to sovereignty or national security. In such cases, increasing the cost of Turkish behaviour may signal European resolve without producing a change in policy. Conditionality works best when it creates incentives for a negotiated adjustment, not when it becomes a substitute for diplomacy. Europe therefore needs to pair credible costs with equally credible benefits and a political route back to cooperation.

Keep the accession question open

Managed interdependence is not a substitute for democracy, nor does it require pretending that Turkish accession is imminent. It is a framework for organising relations in the space between joining and walking away. But that raises the question of what should happen to Turkey’s candidate status. Three options are on the table.

Re-opening accession negotiations is unrealistic: the talks have been at a standstill since 2018 and there is neither consensus for a fresh start nor much value in pretending membership is approaching. Formally closing the process would be worse. It would remove one of the last institutional links between the two, weaken pro-European constituencies inside Turkey and make cooperation harder without resolving a single underlying dispute.

The better course is to leave candidate status legally intact but politically dormant and build the cooperation around it. However, the relationship should not be called a “privileged partnership”. This term, floated in some European capitals in the past, remains toxic in Turkey as Ankara sees it as a demotion that in practice would close the accession door forever. The substance is more important: a deep and differentiated partnership of managed interdependence that both sides have reason to maintain, with the formal question left open.

Turkey would remain outside the EU’s political core but get closer where interests align: NATO planning, Ukraine and Black Sea security, defence production, trade, energy, migration, mobility and Syria. In return, Europe would demand greater predictability, sanctions compliance, institutional accountability and adherence to agreed rules.

Disagreement would persist over Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, aspects of the regional order, and Turkey’s continued relations with Russia and China. Managed interdependence is not designed to erase those differences, but to prevent them from bringing down the wider structure of cooperation.

Europe’s choice is not between restoring the Turkey of the past and accepting permanent divergence. It is between an interdependence left hostage to crises and personal bargains, or one organised around common projects, reciprocal obligations and enforceable conditions. A successful strategy would give Turkey room to act as a middle power while making Western cooperation more valuable than the alternatives.

Neither home nor away

Over the past two decades, Turkey has gone from aspiring to regional influence to building the capabilities to exercise it—military deployments, overseas bases, defence exports, economic networks and diplomatic channels. The paradox is that much of this autonomy rests on continued integration with the West. Turkish embeddedness is the platform Turkish autonomy runs on. Ankara has learned to operate in the space between alliance and independence, sufficiently autonomous to shape regional crises, yet sufficiently embedded that the West cannot easily exclude it.

There are limits to this model. Turkey might be able to disrupt arrangements it opposes, but it has been less successful at building durable regional arrangements of its own. That asymmetry is the opening for Europe. A Turkey that can obstruct but not construct needs partners for what it wants to achieve—reconstruction money in Syria, advanced technology for its defence programmes and markets for its exports. Europe has been slow to use this leverage because it keeps looking for a different kind of relationship: an ally that agrees, or an adversary it can hold at arm’s length. Turkey is neither.

Europe needs to stop waiting. It should start using the interdependence that already exists around common projects and enforceable terms. This will not eliminate the contradictions at the heart of the relationship. It will instead turn those contradictions into a framework for bargaining, making cooperation possible without requiring alignment and disagreement manageable without producing rupture.

Acknowledgments 

We are grateful to Jana Puglierin and the Re:Order team at ECFR for encouraging us to take on this project and for helping shape the original idea, and to Angela Mehrer for her coordination throughout. Thanks also to Jeremy Cliffe and the ECFR publications team for their guidance on the initial proposal and outline, and to Nastassia Zenovich whose work on the maps was essential. We would also like to thank the many officials, experts and practitioners who shared their insights with us on an off-the-record basis; their perspectives informed the argument in important ways. Finally, we are especially grateful to Taisa Sganzerla for her thoughtful and incisive editing, which sharpened both the structure and the argument of the paper. 

About the authors

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is an associate senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she also directs the Turkey Project. Before joining the foreign policy community, Aydintasbas had a long career in journalism, including writing a Global Opinions column for the Washington Post. She has covered wars in the Middle East and lived in New York and Istanbul, holding positions at Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, and CNN Turk. She is a regular commentator on the Middle East and Turkey and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, among others. Her recent publications include “Turkey’s search for a new Middle East order” and “Turkey’s post-American hesitation” on the impact of the Iran war. She has also recently written “Here is how one country may have solved a violent uprising” and “Trump, don’t repeat Churchill’s mistake” for the New York Times. 

Evren Balta is a professor of international relations at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. She is also academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum, co-director of the Democracy Lab at Özyeğin University, a permanent member of the North South Futures Forum and a member of the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also affiliated with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of several books, including “The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism”, which received a Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She holds a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, an MIA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and an MA in sociology from Middle East Technical University.

This paper is part of the Re:Order project and was made possible with support from Stiftung Mercator, but does not necessarily represent its view.

Source

The top U.S. Air Force officer in Europe, who also serves as the NATO Allied Air Command leader, said he has been tasked with enacting new alliance plans to defend against cruise missiles and drones. He was responding to questions about a drone that NATO had to shoot down after it entered Lithuanian airspace overnight. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday morning that the incident was “part of a broader pattern of Russian aggression and provocation against Europe, testing our readiness and our resolve.”

The drone incursion into Lithuania took place against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine and amid a spate of so-called ‘hybrid’ or ‘gray zone’ actions Moscow has been accused of carrying out throughout Europe, including a recent attempted drone attack on the Leipzig-Halle airport in Germany.

We now know that Russia is responsible for the attempted explosive attack at Leipzig airport. Russia's repeated hybrid attacks on Germany and Europe are unacceptable. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/o3vBjgpeb1

— German Embassy Washington (@GermanyinUSA) September 1, 2026

“I don’t know what’s in the mind of Putin or his fielded forces about those one-way attack drones or even cruise missiles, like we’ve seen enter Polish airspace just a few months ago. In July, we had an AS-23 cruise missile enter Poland,” Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe/U.S. Air Forces Africa (USAFE), and Commander of the Allied Air Command, said in response to a question about the drone shootdown over Lithuania. He was speaking during a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Conference that TWZ is attending.

Hinds added that while he doesn’t “know the why behind” the drone incursion into Lithuania, he has been tasked by U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, who serves as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), “to fully implement EVA [Enhanced Vigilance Activity] Eastern Sentry and now its Standing Defense Plan 12000, which gives the nations the capabilities that they need to defend their airspace against either one-way attack drones like the one that you described last night, or a cruise missile.”

EVA Eastern Sentry is a mission NATO stood up in September 2025 after “an unprecedented number of Russian drones and planes violated the airspace of several NATO Allies,” according to the alliance. “Allies are contributing additional capabilities and assets to NATO’s deterrence and defense – for instance, more fighter jets, helicopters, transport aircraft, air defense systems, surveillance aircraft and frigates – and improving the coordination of these assets through NATO.”

Standing Defense Plan 12000 is a new plan for integrated air and missile defense across the alliance. Grynkewich introduced the concept during testimony to Congress in March.

Hinds acknowledged that Russia could be testing the alliance.

“It’s not about the small UASs; that’s typically a national responsibility, and it could be probing,” the Air Force general noted. “Regardless of the intent behind it, what we want to be prepared for is the second that a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile is first and foremost detected – hopefully well before it enters NATO territory – we want to know it. We want to know where it’s coming from. We want to have the capability to sense it. We want to be able to have the C2 [command and control] systems to be able to decide what to do about it, and then have the right kit to be able to act.”

Despite an integrated air and missile defense system that includes Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, NATO currently is primarily “using air power” against drones and cruise missiles “and that’s not putting us on the right side of the cost curve,” Hinds stated. “But we want to get there.”

Using NATO jets to take down drones “is very effective, just like what you saw last night, and many other times,” but not necessarily efficient, Hinds explained. 

“I think there’s been at least five other cases of allied nations providing air power to shoot down one-way attack drones,” he proffered. “I want to get to the point where we’re doing it efficiently, using lower-cost interceptors, hopefully ground-based, and in some cases air-based that are cheaper to use, so we’ll see what the intent may be. Intelligence organizations are going to provide us with that intelligence later on, but I just don’t know yet.”

You can see one of those NATO jet engagements with drones in the following video.

NATO airpower in action this morning, safeguarding Latvian airspace. pic.twitter.com/Ugzbx8aaZS

— Marko Mihkelson (@markomihkelson) June 8, 2026

It should be noted that Europe is starting to follow the American lead in using less expensive laser-guided, air-to-air rockets as drone-killing weapons. TWZ was the first to report about the use of 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) rockets by the U.S. The U.K. Royal Air Force announced in May of this year that its Typhoons were now equipped with APKWS rockets while the French recently tested their own 68mm laser-guided rockets from Rafale fighters.

The Defence Procurement Agency has successfully completed integration testing of 68 mm laser-guided rockets on the Rafale fighter jet. The time between the contract being awarded for this new capability and initial operational capability being achieved was less than 8 months. pic.twitter.com/rR2Nij9EzY

— French Aid to Europe (@aidefranceukr) July 13, 2026

As the threats have evolved, NATO has “transitioned away from air policing, and we’ve transitioned to air defense for some specific reasons,” the general pointed out. “One is readiness. Air policing is a readiness decrementing mission that the alliance has done for years. There’s also an assurance mission that we did for 32 nations. That’s transitioned to air defense now. Air defense means we have the right kit, multi-domain, to be able to be put in the right place based on indications, warnings, or real threats, like you saw last night, inside of the Baltic nations, to be able to respond decisively and quickly.”

“There’s also a deterrence value there,” Hinds added. “So if Russia does fly a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile, they know that we’re going to be in the right spot to be able to detect it and then defend against it.”

“These are limited incursions, right? Small numbers. Here’s what I see: hybrid activities may, in fact, only be one of the few levers that Putin has available to him, because he sees that he does not have an advantage in geography, domain, or readiness,” Hinds suggested.

“Think about that,” he urged. “So what are we seeing? We’re not seeing a massing of forces across the opposite side of Finland, a new NATO nation. We’re not seeing a massing of forces whatsoever in any domain opposite of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia. You’re seeing a significant number of one-way attack drones in the Black Sea targeting Ukraine. Some of them are entering Romania. What you’re not seeing is a direct confrontation in geography. We’re not seeing direct competition in domains. And I think Putin knows that we are ready. I know he knows that we’re a defensive alliance. I know he knows that we have an advantage in every domain against them, and I think that’s likely why you’re seeing things like what you’re seeing with hybrid activity.”

Though below the level of armed conflict, these Russian activities raise the potential for something worse, Hinds posited.

“The risk about hybrid activity, from my perspective, is it could lead to escalation, and that’s where I hope that we get back towards deterrence again, and that the nations they’re going to decide to do what they want to do when it comes to these hybrid activities,” the general said. “Some of them are law enforcement. Some of them are military responses, and that’s up to the nations to decide how they’re going to deal with that. Not me.”

“But what I owe General Grynkewich is to ensure that we are demonstrating our deterrence each and every day, and we’re doing that effectively across all domains,” Hinds added. “And to ensure that Putin knows that if he tries something against the alliance, that we will be there, and we’re ready to win decisively if challenged.”

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post NATO Air Commander Details Thinking Behind The Alliance’s New Air Defense Plan appeared first on TWZ.

Auf diese Meldung bin ich in der russischen Nachrichtenagentur TASS gestoßen und sie hat mich wegen ihrer Einfachheit fasziniert, denn ein italienischer Publizist hat ein komplexes Thema wenigen und einfachen Worten auf den Punkt gebracht. Alessandro Orsini schrieb in seiner Kolumne für die Zeitung „Il Fatto Quotidiano“, der Ukraine-Konflikt habe das Ende der EU als […]

Yahodyn, il treno colpito e la Polonia che alza la posta Conviene partire dalla dinamica concreta dell’incidente, perché nei primi resoconti alcuni particolari decisivi sono rimasti sullo sfondo. Il 13 ...

Leggi tutto

Obwohl ich diese Woche wieder in Moskau zu tun hatte, haben wir es trotzdem geschafft, am Donnerstag eine neue Folge von Tacheles mti Röper und Stein aufzuzeichnen, die nun online ist. Sollte YouTube die Sendung löschen, finden Sie sie auch hier bei NuoViso.

The stabilization of the Iran-Israel confrontation could well be the calm before the storm, only this time the storm would be between Israel and Türkiye. In this context, the question arises: how would such a conflict affect NATO? Reasons for Escalation Relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv are rapidly deteriorating amid the war in the […]

Nach einer Woche Pause, weil NuoViso letzte Woche sein Sommerfest gefeiert hat, haben Robert Stein und ich am Donnerstag wieder eine Tacheles-Sendung aufgezeichnet, die nun online ist. Sollte YouTube sie löschen, finden Sie sie auch hier bei NuoViso.

Der russische Außenminister Lawrow hat auf dem Östlichen Wirtschaftsforum eine Grundsatzrede über die Positionen der russischen Außenpolitik und über Russlands Antwort auf die aktuellen Eskalationsschritte der Bundesregierung gehalten. Ich übersetze hier die Zusammenfassung der Rede, die die TASS veröffentlicht hat. Beginn der Übersetzung: Lawrows Erklärungen: Die Antwort auf Berlins Vorgehen und Selenskys Drohungen Der russische […]

Questo il testo suggerito: “Con la presente chiedo la sospensione della imminente puntata sull’11 settembre, che è stata affidata ad un conduttore inadeguato come. In alternativa, chiedo la presenza di qualcuno preparato sulla questione 11 settembre, che possa fare da contraddittorio alle tesi di Moccia. Se la puntata dovesse andare in onda senza contraddittorio, sarà mio impegno evitare in futuro di guardare canale NOVE, di invitare tutte le mie conoscenze a boicottarlo, e di denunciare tramite social la eventuale messa in onda di false informazioni da parte vostra. Inviterò anche chi ha un abbonamento a Discovery o altri canali Warner a considerare la cancellazione dell’account, in segno di protesta.” /// Questi gli indirizzi a cui spedire la mail: discoveryitaliasrl@legalmail.it, milan_wbdreception@discovery.com, info@discovery-italia.it /// Qui la lettera inviata ad Aldo Romersa: https://luogocomune.net/11-settembre/11-settembre-in-tv-boicottiamo-discovery /// Tutti i documentari di Massimo Mazzucco: https://massimomazzucco.net

L'articolo 11 settembre in TV: boicottiamo Discovery proviene da Casa del Sole TV.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte Photographer: Dati Bendo © European Union
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday (2 September) that Europe and NATO would increase pressure on Russia after Germany attributed an attempted attack on cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Moscow, calling the incident a “new escalation” on European Union soil, writes Catherine Feore.

“This was an attack using military-grade material, carried out by Russian operatives on European Union soil. We will not tolerate it,” von der Leyen said alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Brussels.

The German government said on Tuesday (1 September) that its investigation and intelligence findings established Russian responsibility for the attempted attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport last month. Russia has denied responsibility.

The meeting took place as foreign ministers and the EU's High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy were meeting to discuss Russia and Ukraine among other issues.

“Had this attack succeeded, this would have resulted in enormous damage and possibly even loss of life,” von der Leyen said. “We stand in full solidarity with Germany.”

“If the intention was to make us think twice about supporting Ukraine, I can tell you it has only strengthened my resolve. Intimidation will not work.”

Von der Leyen said the Leipzig incident was part of a wider pattern of Russian activity confronting Europe, including airspace incursions, drones disrupting airports and interference with critical infrastructure.

“Leipzig marks a new escalation on European Union soil, directly attributed to Russia,” she said. 

Von der Leyen outlined three areas for a stepped-up European response: stronger protection of European infrastructure backed by additional sanctions on Russia, increased air-defence support for Ukraine, and an acceleration of Europe’s own defence build-up in close cooperation with NATO.

Infrastructure and sanctions

First, von der Leyen said Europe must strengthen the protection of infrastructure that could be targeted by Russian hybrid operations and be prepared to respond more quickly when attacks occur.

“We must treat our everyday infrastructure as frontline targets, and protect them accordingly,” she said.

The EU already has rapid response teams that can assist member states faced with such attacks, she said, arguing that Europe’s ability to prepare and respond would itself act as a deterrent.

Von der Leyen also said the EU was ready to intensify economic pressure on Moscow through sanctions. “Our sanctions have weakened Russia’s economy. We can use more sanctions and have them ready to impose as soon as such dangerous, life-threatening acts are attributed,” she said. “Every loophole Russia exploits is one we must close.”

European foreign ministers were discussing new listings in Ireland on Wednesday, she said, while the Commission was examining further ways to “cut deeper into Russia’s war chest”.

More air defence for Ukraine

Von der Leyen said her second priority was strengthening support for Ukraine, announcing that the EU had received a new request worth several billion euros for air-defence capabilities.

“Today, I can confirm that we have received a new payment request,” she said. “It is worth several billion euro, and would cover Ukraine’s air defenses, including the highly advanced PAC-3 Patriot air defense systems.”

Member states were considering the request, she said.

“I can say that it’s going in the right direction.”

Von der Leyen also pointed to European work with Ukraine on the FRIO project to develop anti-ballistic missile defences, as well as the EU’s €90 billion support loan.

“Since June, we have issued €8.5 billion for drones and missiles for Ukraine from this loan,” she said, adding that the funding could also be used to buy fighter aircraft from European industry.

Faster European defence build-up

Von der Leyen’s third priority was to accelerate Europe’s defence build-up alongside NATO, with air defence at the centre of the effort.

“Air defenses are critical,” she said. “We need a faster, more integrated alert system across Europe, and then we must intercept the threats faster.”

She pointed to the EU’s €800 billion defence investment plan, including €150 billion through the SAFE instrument, as a way for European countries to increase defence investment jointly.

“We are in a new era of European security,” von der Leyen said. “European investment in defense strengthens NATO and re-energizes our industrial base.”

Rutte backed von der Leyen’s assessment of the threat, saying Russia had become “increasingly reckless” as its war against Ukraine continued.

“We have seen more drones and missiles crossing into our airspace along our eastern flank, creating increased risk,” Rutte said.

“And we have also seen an increase in malign activities targeting our territory directly, whether it is fires set in factories producing defense equipment for Ukraine, or indeed the Russian hybrid attack in Leipzig.”

“The examples are many. The dangers Russia poses are clear,” he added.

Rutte said NATO was working “around the clock” to ensure it could protect its population and said Moscow would fail if it hoped attacks such as Leipzig would undermine Western backing for Kyiv.

“If Russia thinks we will be divided by the threat, or if they think we will be deterred from supporting Ukraine, they are mistaken,” he said. “Our unity is unshaken. Our support to Ukraine is clear.”

Rutte said NATO allies had agreed to provide at least €70 billion to support Ukraine this year and the same amount next year, with the EU loan forming a “crucial element” of that support.

The NATO chief also backed the push for additional air defence and increased defence production, saying higher spending had to translate into additional military capabilities and greater industrial capacity.

Von der Leyen said the EU and NATO would not be intimidated into reducing their support for Ukraine. “Europe and NATO will not just maintain our pressure on Russia; we will increase it,” she said. “We will not stop — not until Russia stops bombing and killing innocent children, men and women in Ukraine. We will continue, we will prevail, and we will deter anyone who attacks our freedom and our security.”

The conscripts are part of the first group recruited under Denmark's expanded military service program.

The post Denmark deploys conscripts to Greenland, fueling fresh Arctic tensions appeared first on BOL News.

Die ständigen Provokationen der EU-Staaten, die es darauf anzulegen scheinen, Russland zu einer bewaffneten Antwort auf Ziele in Europa zu bringen, sind vor allem angesichts des offensichtlichen Mangels an Luftabwehrsystemen vollkommen unverständlich, denn die europäische Rüstungsindustrie kann derzeit nicht genug Luftabwehrmunition für eine großen Krieg produzieren. Und auch die Lager der USA sind leer. Darunter […]

Ende Juli hat mich eine Meldung über ein russisches Militärflugzeug über der Ostsee, was der Spiegel natürlich als weiteren Beleg für die „russische Aggression“ angeführt hat, auf die Idee gebracht, mal einen Monat lang die Meldungen über Spionageflugzeuge der NATO nahe der russischen Grenze zu sammeln, denn in westlichen Medien erfährt man über die Anzahl […]

US secretary of state Marco Rubio described NATO’s July gathering in Ankara, two months before it convened, as “one of the more important leaders’ summits in [its] history.” The summit confirmed that Europeans have accepted America’s expectation that they do more for their own security. The Ankara declaration recognised that “European allies and Canada, working together with the United States, are assuming greater responsibility for the alliance’s defence.” Accepting that shift is one thing; paying for it is another. For European policymakers the question is now fiscal. It turns on what Europe is willing to pay for. And for the EU’s frugal members, that means rethinking what they treat as strategic.

Getting defence into the budget

According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, replacing US military capabilities in Europe could require around $1tn (about €900bn) in extra investment. NATO’s new target to invest 5% of GDP in defence similarly implies a sustained increase in European defence spending over the coming decade. Together they suggest that defence is no longer crisis spending but a permanent claim on European budgets.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU has found money for defence, but always as extraordinary spending. The European Defence Fund and SAFE (Security Action for Europe, a loan scheme for joint arms purchases), for example, sit outside the ordinary budget. Such instruments expire; the challenge is to embed this spending into the EU’s regular budget. Winning defence a permanent line in it makes negotiations over the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) far more than another exercise in budgetary bargaining.

The MFF is the EU’s seven-year budget—and where any pledge on defence would have to show up in funds. The commission’s proposal for 2028–34 reflects such a commitment. It allocates €131bn to defence and space, roughly five times the current level, and puts security among the EU’s central priorities.

Out of the negotiating box

Commission proposals rarely emerge intact from negotiation, and early signs suggest this pattern may repeat itself.

Commission proposals rarely emerge intact from negotiation, however, and early signs suggest this pattern may repeat itself. Cyprus, which held the presidency until the end of June, left a negotiating box on how to structure the next MFF that envisioned reductions in defence and security while protecting cohesion policy and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The box is the presidency’s draft compromise, the text the final deal is built from. The Irish presidency has opened with a strong focus on competitiveness and security, but Ireland leans heavily on farming too.

Budget negotiations are shaped by coalitions that defend long-established spending. The 16 member states of the “Friends of Cohesion” group, Spain, Italy and Poland among them, want robust funding for cohesion policy and agriculture, while frugal member states, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, are reluctant to expand the overall size of the EU budget. Defence enters as a comparative newcomer against policies with decades of institutional backing and organised constituencies behind them.

Germany’s position illustrates this dilemma. In a parliamentary inquiry, Alliance 90/The Greens asked the federal government how the EU can square four things at once: from 2028 it will need to start repaying NextGenerationEU, the €637bn joint borrowing agreed as a one-off in 2020 to fund members’ recovery from covid-19; forgo new revenue of its own (levies it collects directly rather than cheques from national treasuries); hold its budget roughly the same size; and still strengthen competitiveness, security and defence. The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has repeatedly committed to the last three. The government answered that the EU could meet all three objectives by trimming across the whole budget. Yet such “horizontal cuts” only protect these priorities if all 27 members agree what to spare when deciding the cuts, and they are unlikely to agree. Other member states could favour different areas of the EU budget, cutting competitiveness or security harder than Germany intends.

New financing for a new era

The scale of investment required to deliver Europe’s defence transformation also exceeds what can realistically be financed through the MFF alone. While the seven-year budget can establish political priorities, provide long-term planning certainty and support common capability development, it cannot generate the sums required to finance Europe’s long-term defence.

Hence the appeal of joint EU borrowing: debt raised by the commission against member-state guarantees, the model already used for NextGenerationEU and SAFE. NextGenerationEU demonstrated that the EU can raise substantial resources when confronted with an existential crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic. Europe’s security has changed just as fundamentally, which makes the case for borrowing together just as strong. If defence is a collective problem, leaving the bill to strained national budgets makes little sense. However, borrowing on that scale is politically out of reach: creditor states intend NextGenerationEU to stay an exception rather than a template. Something narrower—bonds (or comparable fiscal mechanisms) that fund defence alone or the technologies Europe cannot do without may prove necessary if the EU wants to match its strategic ambitions with adequate financial resources.

Europe has accepted that it must carry more of its own defence. The MFF negotiations will show whether its budget can pay for it. With NATO entering a new era of European burden-sharing, the EU cannot afford a budget that reflects the priorities of a different geopolitical age. The world has moved on—it is time that frugal member states like Germany did so, too.

Source

Da ich letzte Woche bereits beim Homeofffice von NuoViso über all die Themen gesprochen habe, die wir normalerweise bei Tacheles sprechen, haben wir Tacheles letzte Woche ausnahmsweise ausfallen lassen. Aber heute gibt es wieder eine aktuelle Folge von „Tacheles mit Röper und Stein“. Nächste Woche fällt Tacheles übrigens wieder aus, weil NuoViso sein jährliches Sommerfest […]

Die „Mekka-NATO“ wirft viele Fragen auf. Ist sie ein Bündnis sunnitischer Staaten gegen schiitische? Ist es ein Bündnis gegen Israel? Und was ist eigentlich der Sinn dieses Bündnisses? Auf all diese Fragen gibt es noch keine klaren Antworten, das werden wohl erst die weiteren Entwicklungen zeigen. Aber eines kann man festhalten: Das Bündnis ist die […]

Droni Astore Levante tra Leonardo e Baykar: tra il blocco Saipem a Cipro, l'elusione della Legge 185/90 e la perdita di sovranità industriale dell'Italia.

Summary

• Europe faces a dual drone threat, and it is escalating. Small drones regularly disrupt airports and hover over Europe’s critical infrastructure; at the eastern flank, larger military drones are crossing ever more often into EU and NATO territory.
• EU member states are struggling to mount an effective response to the drones spotted over their critical infrastructure, and those countries farther from the eastern flank tend to focus disproportionately on this side of the threat.
• At the flank, efforts to defend against military drone incursions are resulting in a hotch-potch of NATO, EU and national projects. This risks duplicating efforts and stalling progress towards a common operating picture.
• National initiatives at the eastern flank seem the most promising, but the EU still has a role to play in funding and incentivising these efforts. The bloc should also help establish the common operating picture and best practice for legal regulations, and work to improve data sharing.
• The EU and member states should then apply lessons from the eastern flank to the related but different threat to their critical infrastructure. That way, they can help Europe move closer to a continent-wide response to both sides of this continent-wide problem.

Today’s problem

On August 5th 2026, a small drone armed with explosives was found at Leipzig airport in Germany. The presence of explosive material marks this out from previous incidents at airports, as does the fact that authorities recovered the drone. But Europe’s new normal is for small drones to disrupt its airports and buzz around other critical infrastructure, including French nuclear submarine bases, Belgian nuclear power plants and German liquefied natural gas terminals. Some of these sightings are likely part of Russia’s hybrid war against Europe. Yet the drones are probably flown from inside European countries or from ships in the North and Baltic seas, and definitive attribution to Russia or any other actor remains elusive.

The countries along Europe’s eastern flank have another new normal to contend with. This entails the connected but different threat of military drones crossing into EU and NATO territory from Russia, Belarus and, because of the Russian aggression against it, Ukraine. The most egregious incursion so far took place in September 2025, when around 20 Russian military drones crossed into Poland’s airspace, leading it to invoke Article 4 of NATO’s Washington Treaty. That episode also prompted NATO to launch Operation Eastern Sentry to increase its vigilance at the border.

Unlike the small drones hovering over critical infrastructure, the origin of the military drones crossing into EU and NATO territory is no mystery. The attribution problem here relates to intention, as Russia can claim—sometimes plausibly, sometimes less so—that incursions at the eastern flank are accidents resulting from its war against Ukraine.

Almost a year on from the Poland incident, the member states that line the eastern flank face military drone incursions with alarming (and increasing) regularity. The end of July, for example, saw Romania shoot down three suspected Russian drones in as many days. This followed another incursion in the country in May when a drone crashed into the roof of a ten-storey building in Galati and exploded, starting a fire in one of the apartments. A 14-year-old and his mother were injured, and 70 residents were evacuated. The Romanian military had tracked the drone and deployed two F-16 fighter jets in response to the threat. But the jets were unable to fire at the target for “operational reasons and [because of] certain legal limitations”.

The incidents in Romania lay bare some of the difficulties for Europe in defending its eastern flank against military drones. Over the past year, NATO’s operation has swiftly been joined by a hotch-potch of national and EU projects, including the bloc’s ambitious and wide-ranging European Drone Defence Initiative. But as things stand, military drones still either fly unhindered into EU and NATO territory or are intercepted through the costliest means possible, namely missiles fired from fighter jets.

Police forces across the continent, meanwhile, are struggling to mount an effective response to the problem of the small drones over their critical infrastructure. And countries farther from the eastern flank tend not to make the link between this largely civil threat and the military threat in the east: when the EU first proposed its initiative, for example, western European states were unconvinced that the bloc should fund drone defences at the eastern flank.

But, as this paper argues, all European countries need to act to secure the eastern flank—both to defend EU and NATO territory against military drones and to inform Europe’s response to small drones flying over its critical infrastructure. National efforts at the flank are promising but will likely prove insufficient. The EU will therefore have to spread the costs of defending the eastern flank, as efforts there contribute to the defence of the entire continent against military drone attacks. That small drones flying over critical infrastructure are a problem everywhere should further incentivise all Europeans to speed up their work on drone defence. And as this paper shows, the EU and member states can apply lessons learned at the eastern flank across Europe and reuse technology battle-tested in the east to protect their critical infrastructure.

The dual threat

The two sides of Europe’s drone threat are different, but they still share important similarities: they involve the same tools—drones of one type or another—and some likely have the same perpetrator—Russia. Mapping just a selection of drone overflights of critical infrastructure and incursions at the eastern flank since August 2024 lays bare the extent of the dual drone threat Europe is facing. And every time an overflight of critical infrastructure or incursion at the eastern flank happens, wherever it comes from, Russia learns something about Europe’s ability to fight (or otherwise) against these systems.

Drones over critical infrastructure

Drones are regularly spotted over critical infrastructure across Europe. The German aviation agency reported 227 drone sightings by pilots in 2025. These numbers have been rising steadily since reporting began in 2020, and the 2026 numbers are well on track to surpass last year’s.[1] Such incidents are largely a civil matter, which means responsibility for recording, identifying and countering them falls on local authorities such as police forces.

The overflights near airports tend to grab the most attention for three reasons. First, drones pose an extreme risk to aircraft and have the potential to cause mass casualty events, with the incident in Leipzig perhaps the closest call so far. German newspaper Die Zeit reports that CCTV footage from the airport shows the drone flying towards an Antonov cargo plane parked on the runway, hitting one of the wings and then falling to the ground. It was later discovered on the tarmac by a bus driver, who alerted security. Had the explosives detonated, the consequences could have been catastrophic. But even without explosives, drones have the potential to cause an air disaster if they collide with a plane, particularly if it is taking off or landing. Second, drones near airports cause significant economic harm: Copenhagen airport had to close for four hours in September 2025, while more than 30 flights were cancelled in Munich following drone sightings in March 2025. Third, airport closures tangibly affect citizens, which is likely why they are such common targets in the first place.

But from a security standpoint, equally concerning are sightings over other critical infrastructure like energy hubs and military installations. Drones can, for instance, help hostile operators gather intelligence about the security arrangements at these installations. They could then use this to enable future sabotage or attacks.

Among these sites, drone activity around military installations could be highly consequential. In early 2025, the German ministry of defence logged six instances of drone overflights at Schwesing airbase, a Bundeswehr base where Ukrainian soldiers were trained to use Patriot air-defence missile systems. It is plausible that the drones carried signals-intelligence equipment that could identify soldiers’ mobile phones. Once it had identified the phones, Russia may have been able to locate them again months later at the Ukrainian front line—and with them, the valuable and increasingly scarce Patriot batteries. This is a direct concern for the Ukrainian defence effort. But it also points to a larger problem for Europe, as it illustrates the type of information Russia could be collecting about European armed forces.

It remains unproven where most of the drones used in overflights come from and who controls them. But it is probable that at least some of the drones flying over critical infrastructure are part of Russia’s hybrid war against Europe. For years, Russia has conducted attacks against military and civil infrastructure as well as government entities. Some attacks take place in the cyber-realm; some involve physical sabotage, like igniting air freight packages in Britain, Germany and Poland, and damaging submarine cables in the Baltic Sea. US intelligence also helped Germany foil a plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the CEO of arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. Sweden, meanwhile, has faced attacks on its telecommunications network. And disinformation campaigns have targeted the whole of Europe for years, including in the aftermath of drone sightings and disruption.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz has noted that Russian agents may be behind at least some of the overflights; Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said she could not “rule out in any way that it [was] Russia” behind the airport disruptions in Copenhagen; and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has argued that “the drone incidents across Europe clearly show that Russia is prepared to escalate this war and that it has never been just about Ukraine.” Moreover, in 2025 investigative journalists traced several drone flights back to Russian ships in the North and Baltic seas. Since then, a June 2026 report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies has assessed it is “highly likely” Russia conducted a drone campaign against Europe, largely towards the end of 2025. This research also found that the source of some of these drones may have been Russian shadow fleet vessels.

The types of drones used in these operations have not been definitively identified. However, analyses of images as well as eye-witness accounts point to fixed-wing surveillance drones, as well as quadcopter systems. In at least one incident there were reports of a “mothership” drone, a larger fixed-wing system which carries smaller quadcopter drones. The Leipzig drone has been identified as a quadcopter, roughly the size of a microwave oven.

Still, definitive proof of the types of drone used in overflights or where they come from will depend on police forces apprehending more of them. The fact that local authorities across Europe have been unable to do this could compound a feeling among the public of failure by the state and leave the information vacuum wide open. The lack of information also means it is impossible to distinguish between real sightings and false alarms—like the 2016 case of a drone sighting from an aeroplane which turned out most likely to have been a plastic bag.

European authorities should also be able to stop drones around their critical infrastructure regardless of who flies them. The context of the Russia-Ukraine war has turned the drone threat into a geopolitical problem, yet non-state actors pose their own threat. Given the availability of drones, drone terrorism is a rising security concern—and far-right groups in the US, for example, are reportedly looking into first-person view drones to target law enforcement. But to date no major terrorist attacks by drone have taken place, only some thwarted plans, which is surprising.

But Europe’s drone problem also has a military side, and the continent seems equally unprepared to counter it efficiently and effectively.

Drones crossing the eastern flank

Alongside dealing with overflights, countries along the eastern flank must contend with military drones threatening EU and NATO territory from the east. Such incursions have taken place regularly since Russia began its war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022 and have intensified since 2025.

Only two weeks after the full-scale invasion, a drone (most likely Ukrainian) flew undetected for hundreds of kilometres over Romania and Hungary, before crashing near Zagreb in Croatia. Russian drones came down in Romania in 2023, and in Poland and Lithuania in 2025.

But the number of incidents has grown significantly in 2026. Russian and (more frequently) Ukrainian drones have veered off course since the start of the year, coming down in Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and elsewhere. In May, people took shelter in Lithuania when a drone alert brought Vilnius to a standstill; and across the border in Latvia, both the defence minister and the prime minister lost their jobs over a political response to drone incursions that was deemed insufficient. When the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting over the Galati incident in June, Romania’s minister for foreign affairs noted that it was just one of more than 40 incursions into the country’s airspace in 2026 alone—a number which has grown significantly since then.

Initially such incidents appeared to be accidents, caused by guidance-systems failures, operating errors and interference by electronic countermeasures. But the September 2025 incident in which around 20 military drones entered Poland from different places raised concerns that some might be deliberate provocations. The increasing intensity since then has done nothing to alleviate those concerns. After one May incursion in Latvia, Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said that Russian electronic warfare systems “deliberately diverted Ukrainian drones from their targets in Russia”—not going quite as far as to argue Russia was deliberately sending drones over NATO and EU territory, though this is a possible conclusion.  

The drones that crashed in Poland were later identified as Russian Gerberas, an unarmed variant of what was originally the Iranian Shahed-136 loitering munition.

In response to the incursions, Poland scrambled F-16 fighter jets and several military helicopters. Other NATO states provided support with aerial assets, most notably Dutch F-35s. Together they shot down three of the drones, with the rest crashing on Polish territory, luckily not causing any casualties. Debris was later found in an area spanning hundreds of square kilometres.

While NATO has not disclosed the exact costs of the operation, the missiles the jets fired cost between several hundred thousand and a million euros, depending on the type. Flight hours of F-16s and the much more expensive F-35s run into the tens of thousands of euros. So a single, only partly successful, counter-drone operation cost European countries millions, while Russia likely forked out less than €250,000 to prompt that response. 

Drones continue to cross into NATO and EU territory. Sometimes they are intercepted, but more often they simply crash into the ground, occasionally even going undetected until they do. Were European countries to face an attack involving even a fraction of the numbers Ukraine regularly faces, the consequences would likely be catastrophic—and preventing them would be prohibitively expensive. Once the war ends, and if and when Ukraine becomes an EU or NATO member, defences along the western Ukrainian border—with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania—can move to Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. In the meantime however, the EU, NATO and member states need to learn from Ukraine to secure the flank themselves.

Drones are a whole-of-Europe problem, which means all European countries need to invest in counter-drone capabilities. But starting at the eastern flank makes sense. Compared with the overflights of critical infrastructure, the flank is a more defined threat in a geographically bounded area. If the EU and member states can build an effective response here, it could inform efforts across the rest of the continent, both in terms of what can transfer to that different context and what cannot.

What a protected eastern flank looks like  

Europe’s eastern flank spans different climate zones and topography, urban and rural territory, and forests and agricultural land. Given this and the drone threat discussed above, drone defences will have to be multi-layered. The eastern flank will need a detector layer with several sensor options, a defensive layer with several different countermeasures (“multi-effector”), and the ability to engage several drones at the same time (“multi-shot”). All these systems would ideally feed their data into a common operating picture to create a comprehensive view of the eastern flank. This element will be crucial to detect attacks that may be happening at the same time but hundreds if not thousands of kilometres apart.

Detector layer

The detector layer will comprise various radar and sensor systems. These will have to be spaced along the eastern flank depending on the topography and the presence of buildings, forests, agriculture and similar criteria. Today the eastern flank is monitored primarily through NATO assets and national systems, which focus more on the threat from missiles and aircraft, rather than smaller and slower drones.

Radars offer long-range coverage but can struggle to track smaller drones. Their sensitivity is improving all the time but birds still cause false positives; and as drones can be made from an array of materials, it is possible to manufacture them with minimal, or unusual, radar signatures. Moreover, traditional active radar systems that send an electromagnetic pulse and capture its return signal can be too easy for adversaries to identify. To overcome this problem, passive radar systems that work by sensing changes in the electromagnetic spectrum as objects move through space are in development.

Electro-optical sensors would complement radar. These can identify drones based on visual and temperature identifiers, which helps operators establish what kind of drone they are dealing with. But they require a clear line of sight, making them less usable in urban or forest environments. Unless they are AI-enabled, electro-optical sensors also require human intervention in real-time to verify whether an image is showing a drone or not, and thus increase staffing requirements. Radio frequency scanning, meanwhile, identifies drones by monitoring common frequency bands, though its accuracy is limited.

Finally, Ukraine has had considerable success with acoustic sensors and has installed thousands across the country. But Ukrainian experiences have also shown that these sensors do not work equally well in all contexts: environments with lots of sounds, like forests, urban areas and agricultural land, can hinder their usefulness.

Defensive layer

As with detection sensors, the defensive layer will have to incorporate several different features, from electronic countermeasures to kinetic solutions.

Electronic countermeasures include spoofing of positioning systems like GPS, and radio frequency jamming that blocks the connection between drone and operator. But these systems can be quite disruptive as they often interfere with all systems in range, making them less useful in urban contexts and near airports. Their effectiveness also often depends on continuous transmission, and they only work on drones that require a connection to the operator. This means they would be ineffective against autonomous, pre-programmed and tethered systems.

Electronic countermeasures have proven highly effective in Ukraine. But Russia has developed several workarounds to Ukraine’s efforts since the start of the war, and vice versa. Today Ukraine’s entire front line is GPS denied, so all drones operating there do so without relying on satellite guidance. Electronic countermeasures are also being circumvented by drones carrying with them up to 40km of fibre-optic cable through which signals are sent. This underlines the need for drone defences at the eastern flank to involve multiple systems.

Radio-frequency-based “cyber takeover” aims to take command of unwelcome drones and safely land them. This is a particularly desirable option as it preserves the drone for analysis. Yet it hinges on the cyber takeover’s ability to work on every drone system, including unknown ones.

Finally, Europe’s eastern flank will require a range of kinetic counter-drone tools—as a last resort for when electronic measures have failed to take down drones. These should include rifle-mounted systems, larger cannon-type systems, guided missiles and drones to fight drones. While generally effective, most kinetic solutions create the danger of collateral damage, as both projectile and drone come crashing down. During the Polish drone incursion in September 2025, the only property damage was caused by a missile that aimed to shoot down the drones.

Ukraine is now using interceptor drones, or drones that take out other drones. These include several systems, like drones with nets or those that ram hostile drones or blow up warheads that come near. (Incidentally, the existence of these systems has led to some confusion over the term “drone wall”, as some reports have suggested that it would be a wall made of drones, a misunderstanding helped along by the fact that a German firm had proposed such a project previously.)

Other countermeasures such as lasers, electromagnetic pulses, strong light and microwave weapons exist, but have not yet matured sufficiently and face similar limitations to those mentioned above, such as the need for line-of-sight or the risk of collateral damage.

Command and control

Crucially, Europe needs a command-and-control node to collect data. For drone defence to be truly integrated and European, the goal should be for this data to feed into a common operating picture that covers the entire flank, from Nuorgam in northern Finland to Burgas in southern Bulgaria. How to respond to a given threat should remain a more local decision, but information-sharing will still be crucial to understand any attack situation. It is equally desirable for European countries to exchange information with NATO’s Integrated Air and Missile Defence. AI and automation may also prove useful, though it will be necessary to heed the lessons of over-reliance on technology and automation, for instance, from the October 7th attacks against Israel.

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Building a multi-layered system of systems like this on the eastern flank may seem a daunting task, not to mention an expensive one. But as the alternative is for EU and NATO countries to continue spending tens of thousands of euros to shoot down a single drone, or not to detect or shoot it down at all, it is a task in which the EU and all European countries have a stake.

The progress so far

The work has already begun. The European Commission has been most vocal about its plans to build up an ambitious “drone wall”, now rebranded as the European Drone Defence Initiative. NATO launched Operation Eastern Sentry in September 2025 and runs counter-drone trials with companies. At the national level, many border states are pursuing counter-drone efforts of varying ambition and scope. But the eastern flank remains a long way away from the defences described above, and the lack of coordination could undermine both the initiatives’ efficacy and their cost-efficiency.

The EU

By accident of the calendar, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address took place just a day after the Poland incident in 2025. In her speech, she called for the EU to establish a “drone wall” that would be the “foundation of a credible European defence” and announced the “Eastern Flank Watch” to conduct real-time surveillance of the eastern border.

Von der Leyen offered more details in another speech at the European parliament a few weeks later, noting that using expensive fighter jets to take down cheap, mass-produced drones was “absolutely not sustainable”. Instead, the drone wall should be a system that performs “swift detection, swift interception, and when needed, swift neutralisation”. In October 2025, the informal European Council meeting in Copenhagen endorsed these projects.

Almost a year on, and the European Drone Defence Initiative and Eastern Flank Watch are two of four EU readiness flagship efforts, alongside the European air and space shields. Yet the Drone Defence Initiative and the Eastern Flank Watch are linked in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The official commission communication notes, for example, that “anti-drone capabilities will form a core component of the Eastern Flank Watch flagship”. In any case, the projects aim to reach initial capacity by end of this year, and full capacity by end of 2027 and 2028, respectively.

While the intention of the EU’s effort is good, its stated scope sounds overly ambitious. For example, the October 2025 Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 notes that “the counter-drone network will be adaptable for civ-mil and dual use purposes and help deal with non-defence related threats or other hazards common to every EU border. This includes border protection, weaponisation of migration, protection of critical infrastructure and transnational organised crime.” Von der Leyen expressed similarly wide-ranging aspirations in her speech to parliament, and added guarding the southern flank to the mix as well as countering the Russian shadow fleet—all with the aid of autonomous systems.

Such an all-encompassing proposal appears set for failure, however, and likely only became so inflated in the first place to placate member states away from the eastern flank.

NATO

Today, NATO is the most active body in fighting drone incursions. After Poland invoked Article 4, the alliance launched Operation Eastern Sentry which increased vigilance along the eastern flank. In many instances when drones have been shot down, it was by fighter jets under NATO command.

NATO also plays a useful role in testing counter-drone technologies for member states to procure. The alliance is, for example, running exercises under its “Layered Counter-Uncrewed Aerial System (UAS) Initiative Crucible”. The first of these took place in Romania and focused on how various sensors, effectors and command-and-control systems could operate as a single, layered defence. Over 250 systems were involved, including radars, acoustic and radio-frequency detectors, electronic warfare tools, and kinetic and non-kinetic effectors. The exercise’s scenario involved drone swarms flown over the Black Sea and included representatives from Ukraine who advised on drone tactics and evolving threats.

Still, NATO’s approach remains primarily focused on fighter jets, as they are at the alliance’s disposal. Any longer-term, more cost-effective solution will depend on member state buy-in and member state efforts.

National efforts

For the moment, national-level counter-drone efforts look most promising. Yet the level of development varies significantly along the eastern flank.

Poland’s plans seem most advanced. In January 2026, the Polish government announced the launch of an “anti-drone wall”, reportedly Europe’s largest counter-drone system. The project is estimated at €3.8bn and brings together a consortium of three companies: the state-owned Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, the Norwegian firm Kongsberg and the Polish company Advanced Protection Systems.

According to Poland’s defence minister, the system will include 18 anti-drone batteries, 52 firing platoons, 18 command platoons, and 703 military trucks and reconnaissance vehicles. The sensor layer will include short- and medium-range radars, passive electronic detection sensors and electro-optical systems. The defensive layer will be based on Kongsberg’s “Protector” family of weapons and include 35mm anti-aircraft guns, capable of firing programmable and high-velocity ammunition; 30mm cannons; 12.7mm multi-barrel heavy machine guns, intended for short-range threats; laser-guided rockets; and interceptor drones. It will also include non-kinetic defences, including electronic warfare capabilities. Deputy defence minister Cezary Tomczyk noted that different systems would be used in different contexts. Referring to the danger from debris, he said: “Some of this is for use only in extreme or war conditions. For example, these multi-barrel machine guns are difficult to use in peacetime, because everything that goes up must go down.”

The Polish initiative’s command-and-control layer integrates fire control, system management and tactical situational awareness, enabling real-time coordination of sensors and effectors. Initial operational capabilities are scheduled for delivery before the end of 2026, with the aim of it being fully operational by the end of 2027. For Poland, the drone wall is only one element of stronger fortifications on its borders with Belarus and the Russian Kaliningrad exclave.

In cooperation with the European Commission, Poland has also announced the creation of a “drone valley”, a hub of drone-related research and testing in the south-east of the country, in Rzeszow—a city that has become the hub for logistical support to Ukraine. Companies are increasingly entering the defence field, so such a hub will host some of the trade fairs and hackathons on counter-drone measures that are becoming more common in Europe.

Further north in the Baltic countries, in February 2025, a consortium of several companies led by the Estonian Defence Industry Cluster initiated the “Baltic drone wall”. The effort includes companies from Poland and Finland, but a request for funding from the EU was rejected in March 2025. Media sources report a multi-layered short-range drone countermeasure system, and efforts to build a common operational picture. But so far, nothing comprehensive has come to pass. Still, in June Estonia began deploying its first fixed drone detection and monitoring systems along its border with Russia. The systems are installed on three sections of the border between the Luhamaa crossing and the tri-border area where Estonia, Latvia, and Russia meet.

Finland’s government announced in April 2026 that it is allocating €44m to the Border Guard to procure drone detection systems, and fixed and mobile counter-drone technologies. It has also been working on drone detection along the border for several months.

As of summer 2026, Romania is experiencing the most frequent incursions. But it only recently began looking into counter-drone systems. The country is now investing heavily in its defences, specifically its aerial defences, which include counter-drone systems. These initiatives are in part financed by EU loans through the re-armament initiative SAFE. The country has also turned to NATO as well as allied countries to help it fight against drone incursions.

In Bulgaria, drone defences have not yet become a priority. The country is, however, looking into the acquisition of counter-drone systems, funded through the EU loan mechanism. Hungary and Slovakia were absent from initial EU drone defence discussions with the other eastern flank states. Slovakia joined later exchanges and has looked into the acquisition of counter-drone systems, but it does not appear to have a more comprehensive counter-drone initiative. In July, Slovakia hosted a NATO test of emerging capabilities which included counter-drone technology, though this was not its main focus.

How to turn the hotch-potch into a whole

It is positive that the EU, NATO and the eastern flank states are working on solutions. But too many initiatives exist, which risks duplicating conceptual work and creating uncertainty for companies that do not know who to work with. The further along individual projects are, the harder it will be to combine them and to facilitate the kind of information exchange needed for a common operating picture. To ensure coherence and interoperability, especially at the data-exchange level, more coordination needs to happen now.

The EU should view this as an opportunity to fulfil its ambitious goal. Although it should drop the aim to create a drone wall that can do just about everything, it can play the coordinating role of bringing the relevant actors together. To do so, the EU should focus on the following five priorities:

1. Support more ambitious and advanced efforts like the Polish and Baltic state counter-drone initiatives. The EU should, for example, identify where gaps or barriers remain in these efforts and where there may be risk of duplication. This would enable the EU to direct its funding, as well as its regulatory and legal expertise, in ways that accelerates those efforts.
2. Fund and incentivise counter-drone efforts in eastern states that are not yet pursuing drone defences with the required urgency: Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia, but also Romania, would benefit from European finance and guidance in scaling up the ambition and scope of their defences.
3. Encourage member states to share best practices, including on regulation and questions of jurisdiction, and establish links between actors and companies already in the field. For example, Germany has reworked its national law to allow the armed forces to intercept drones in extreme cases. In France, a new law allows private companies to ensure protection against drones for civilian infrastructure. There is no reason why every EU member state needs to work out these laws for itself.
4. Create, in cooperation with NATO, common standards and certifications for quality control and to ensure products from different companies are interoperable. This could take the form of a suitability certificate for companies whose systems have proven their usefulness in exercises.
5. Establish a joint operating picture by building a command-and-control node in which data from all eastern flank detection stations are collected. This would enable truly European coordination to bring together national efforts and turn a piecemeal effort into a militarily useful whole.

The EU is already organising virtual meetings between the involved states. It should now develop this coordinating role to share legal best practices and develop common rules regarding when and how military drones can be intercepted in a civilian setting. For example, one reason the drone flying into Romanian airspace in May was not intercepted was uncertainty over the legality of interception: “Ukraine is at war, but Romania is at peace”, a military representative said. All eastern flank states share the same situation. And the fact that many of the national efforts are funded with the help of the SAFE defence loan programme boosts the EU’s legitimacy in taking on this role.

And apply the lessons to the rest of Europe

Organisationally, national police forces deal with drones over critical infrastructure. And the EU is well-placed to help spread insights from counter-drone operations at the eastern flank farther west. Technologically, member states’ experiences at the eastern flank also hold several lessons for the rest of the continent: which systems work and in which environments, for example, and how different technologies can work together. Again, the EU can help to compile and share this valuable information, reducing the burden on member states to collect it themselves.    

Countering drones flying over critical infrastructure will not require something quite as elaborate and unified as defences at the eastern flank:

1. Detector layer: Lessons from the eastern flank on how best to install detection layers and which systems work best can inform local authorities’ decisions about what would work near critical infrastructure. Here, the EU and local authorities will need to take different environments into account: critical infrastructure is often in more urban areas, whereas the eastern flank is generally more rural. Yet the flank includes a multitude of different environments, including forests and swamps, and agricultural and some urban areas, which means detection systems will be tested in numerous areas that can still inform how they might perform nearer cities. 
2. Defensive layer: The EU and local authorities should apply a similar principle to the defensive elements. This includes lessons on how to best layer countermeasures, and which systems work best in which environment. Not all systems that operate at the eastern flank will qualify for deployment in civilian contexts: kinetic systems in particular, would only be used in the most extreme cases to protect critical infrastructure from an immediate threat. But insights from electronic countermeasures and cyber takeover may be transferable to a civilian context.
3. Information exchange: The EU and member states should establish an information exchange on drone incidents near critical infrastructure throughout the union. Countering the threat to critical infrastructure does not require the joint operating picture that military defence does. But collecting and sharing information on drone overflights (as well as other hybrid attacks) over critical infrastructure would allow authorities to detect concerted attack operations.

Today’s solution

Europeans face a dual drone threat over their critical infrastructure and at the eastern flank. They need to address both sides of this problem. While there is no wall to be built and no umbrella to open over the entire continent, insights from one side of the threat can inform the other.

The EU should start by turning its overly ambitious Drone Defence Initiative into something operable. To do so, it should focus on supporting existing national initiatives on the eastern flank and incentivising budding ones. It should also prioritise data-sharing and establishing a joint operating picture, and collecting information on which systems work in what context. The EU should then use this information to help all member states counter drones beyond the eastern flank.

This policy brief focused drone defence—a crucial skill for all European states as drones are without question a threat they will continue to encounter. Yet, with regard to the drone threat from Russia, a better option than to defend against overflights and incursions is to stop them from happening in the first place: no build-up of European defences can replace diplomatic, political and military efforts to end the Russian aggression against Ukraine and Russia’s hybrid attacks against European nations; even if better defences would contribute to deterrence by denial in the meantime.

About the author

Dr Ulrike Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in the Paris office. Her areas of focus include German and European security and defence, the future of warfare, and the impact of new technologies such as drones and AI on geopolitics and warfare.

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[1] DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung, Drone Report, July 2026.

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