CIA warns of Russian drone threat to southern Europe

US intelligence services have shared a report with several European countries pointing to a possible Russian operation using drones against targets in Spain, France or Italy, according to Spanish media.

The information was first revealed by journalist Xavier Colás — a former Russia correspondent — in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. It traces the origin of the alert to CIA director John Ratcliffe's visit to Moscow last August, and sets out a very specific attack scenario: drones launched from merchant vessels disguised as ordinary commercial traffic.

According to information gathered by anonymous sources in Lithuania's Ministry of Defence, and reported by El Mundo, the device in question would be the Gerbera, a small Russian drone (barely two metres long and weighing 18 kilos) capable of travelling up to 600 kilometres at around 160 km/h.

Its limited explosive payload — between four and five kilos — is not intended to cause mass destruction, but to have a symbolic and disruptive effect: temporarily shutting down an airport, starting a fire, or demonstrating that Moscow can strike at Europe's rear without having to cross any land border.

This method is not just a distant hypothesis. The Kremlin has already tested launching drones from maritime platforms. Only last February, a Swedish naval unit detected a drone taking off from a Russian intelligence vessel in the Öresund Strait. Add to this the precedent set by the armed-drone attack at Leipzig airport in Germany, which Berlin attributes to Russian intelligence, and the episode of 19 unarmed drones flying over Polish airspace a year ago.

The Kremlin's logic, according to analysts consulted by the Spanish newspaper, is driven not by geographical proximity but by political vulnerability. British expert Keir Giles, a specialist in Russian military strategy, argues that Moscow will look for "the weakest point in Europe", explicitly naming countries such as Spain, which lack integrated air defence systems suited to this type of threat.