With EU leaders discussing plans to counter Russian drones, what exactly is a ‘drone wall’?

By Catherine Nicholls, CNN

(CNN) — After weeks of repeated incursions into European airspace, officials are meeting in the Danish capital Copenhagen where they are expected to discuss several measures intended to protect the continent’s skies, including a flagship “drone wall” initiative.

The commission, alongside the European Union, is working to build a “Defence Readiness Roadmap,” a source with knowledge on the topic told CNN earlier this week. The roadmap will include four defense projects, including the drone wall, the source said.

The drone wall initiative would not be a physical wall, but instead a layered network of detection and interception systems, building on individual EU members’ anti-drone capabilities.

The idea was announced as a number of European countries reported incursions into their airspace, with most pointing the finger at Russia. The Kremlin denies involvement.

“Europe must deliver a strong and united response to Russia’s drone incursions at our borders,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission said Tuesday.

“And that is why we will propose immediate actions to create the drone wall as part of the Eastern Flank Watch. We must move together forward with Ukraine and with NATO,” she said.

European leaders have released little information about what the initiative could actually look like, or how long it could take to implement.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius warned earlier this week that the development of a drone wall could take at least three or four years.

But Latvia’s Prime Minister Evika Silina told reporters in Copenhagen on Wednesday that it could take far less time than this. “We don’t need three years, and I believe we can do it in a much shorter time,” she said.

While a drone wall could indeed help to patch up the “gaping hole” currently present in NATO’s air defense, the concept of it is not necessarily new, Rafael Loss, a policy fellow in defense, security and technology at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank told CNN on Wednesday.

A project called the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), aiming to bolster European air and missile defense, has been in the works for years, Loss pointed out. Despite this, there are still a number of ways the drone wall could assist NATO and European Union countries.

By expanding the network of sensors along NATO’s eastern flank, countries will be able to identify and track potential drone incursions more effectively, Loss suggested.

“Previously, NATO’s air defense was pitted against fast moving air threats – aircraft missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonics … but not specifically against drones,” he said. “That is slowly changing as a result of what we see in Ukraine.”

Ukraine is the “most experienced country in Europe when it comes to drone and counter drone warfare,” Loss said. Utilizing expertise from advisers involved in that form of conflict could help the rest of the continent understand the best way to fight back against Russian drones, he said.

Anti-drone interception could also be developed further, the policy fellow suggested, with countries leaning away from countering drones with expensive defense systems like Patriots, and instead incorporating cheaper electronic warfare methods including jamming, spoofing or disrupting electronic signals that drones rely upon to work.

With drones being small, cheap and able to carry out significant damage, they are able to pose a disproportionate threat to the countries they are being waged against. As well as being able to cause physical damage, drones can be used for surveillance, and also carry a risk of colliding with aircraft while in the sky.

What’s more, even if a drone is intercepted while flying over a country’s airspace, Loss pointed out, “the debris is going to go down somewhere.”

“If you intercept over a city, you might save the high value target that you’re trying to protect, the parliament or a hospital or a power station or something like it. But still, the debris is going to come down somewhere and potentially create damage to people and property,” he explained.

“You need to complement these kinds of defensive efforts, because, again, there are huge gaps and they need to be filled, but you need to complement this effort with a parallel track that boosts offensive capability so that you can hurt the other side,” Loss said.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Tuesday that a drone wall is an “excellent idea” that is both “timely and necessary,” citing cost as an especially crucial reason to develop the initiative.

“In the end, we cannot spend millions of euros or dollars on missiles to take out the drones, which are only costing a couple of thousand dollars,” he said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.