Young journalists expose Russian-linked vessels off the Dutch and German coast

As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.

I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)

Often enough that coincidences with an unexplainable increase of wealth.

The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target.

Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.

Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.

My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.

> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun

It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.

That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.

How would you 'shoot them down' over densely populated areas without endangering civilians, genius?

In reality it's a bit more complicated, e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-a...

Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).

The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ?

Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mORdXxZ2uKU

> Are any of those drones being shot down?

Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.

The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.

Exactly. Whether those drones are Russian or not the expected course of action is to intercept them, their operators, and launch vehicles. I would say even more so if they are Russian as weakness only encourage more hostile action. So if these vessels is indeed known or highly suspected to be hostile and linked to drones we would expect them to have been intercepted by special forces.

More broadly, the "Russian scare" in Europe is very murky. I have little doubt that it is vastly overblown for domestic purposes. I.e. it serves the EU's agenda of further political integration and involvement in military matters (in which it is normally not or barely).

Generally, whatever happens one way or another in those situations has been decided, and we should never take any public narratives at face value.

Literally any news media in the EU in the last 4 weeks. Drone sightings everywhere, action equals none.

Statistics! Nobody took any action during hundreds of drone incidents in many countries.

bullshit citation reasons

> or maybe they did but keep it to themselves.

Yes agree. There is no incentive that intelligence services would communicate their findings, in fact it's the opposite lol

Of course European countries' intelligence and military know about this.

The question we should ask ourselves is why they let it happen... My take is that the "Russian scare" serves the EU's agenda. You'll notice how European leaders and the EU are stroking fear at every opportunity.

So what? Everyone acts in to further their interests. NATO expands because it's in NATO's interest to do so. Russia says that this expansion is not in Russia's interest. Why only say the Russian part and leave out the NATO part?

Furthermore, if having an interest in something gives the right to use military power to achieve that interest then the argument applies to everyone.

The point about foreign bases in Canada or Mexico gets repeated a lot online, but what is the ultimate point? The USA would not like it, but it's also not a political reality. On the other hand a NATO build out IS a political reality.

So I think rather than focusing purely on what one country wishes it's better to analyze things in terms of what the political realities are and which is better.

In that sense NATO is meant to be a deterrence. Russia doesn't like that. If you ask yourself whose vision of the future is better then the answer is clear. A world of where rule of law is the norm and invasions are deterred is preferable. There has been tremendous peace and prosperity in the EU because of NATO and people have just gotten used to it. They have taken for granted the cost and sacrifice that this peace came from.

However, simply saying that Russia has an interest in not having NATO on their border is almost tautological. Of course they don't want that, but so what. Peace only works if it's enforceable.

NATO didn't expand, those countries DECIDED to join. Why? Because they have lived under the cruelty of Russian aggression.

Just like countries DECIDE to join the EU and not the Warshaw pact.

But, I see that Russian propaganda is doing its job.

And yet when Finland actually joined NATO, Russia said they had no problem with that. Something doesn't add up in your story - and it happens to be the same story told by Russian trolls and useful idiots.

For decades the West, and Germany in particular, tried to turn Russia from an enemy into a trading partner and eventually an ally. Naive, in hindsight? Sure thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s absolutely no reason for Russia to be enemies with the West other than Putin’s imperialist ambitions.

When I think of liberal democracies, I am thinking of places like Estonia, I am not including the current US, UK, and Germany in liberal democracies, Considering the current state in every single one and the recent cases for spying on their own citizens illegally I sincerely doubt they are publishing openly.