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Russia is now apparently bent on turning civilian shipping into disposable drone platforms for attacking targets in Southern Europe.
“Russia is preparing new drone attacks in Europe, but this time it will be against Mediterranean countries.” So reads the first line of a thoroughly bizarre article published Thursday morning by the Spanish daily El Mundo. The article, written by Xavier Colas, the paper’s correspondent for Russia and Eastern Europe, is desperately short on evidence and citations, even by today’s rather low standards.
On the one hand, the article claims in its first paragraph that the warning of imminent Russian drone strikes on targets in South Western Europe came straight from “US intelligence agencies” (the heading even mentions the CIA). Yet throughout the rest of the article the only sources cited are government officials from Lithuania and other unnamed states:
US intelligence services have collected information about the Kremlin’s escalation plans and shared it with several European governments. “They will use drones launched from the sea, hidden in a ship container; it’s not difficult at all.”
…
The justification for such an escalation has been on the table for some time. Moscow has repeatedly insisted that supplying weapons, intelligence and military advisers to Ukraine makes Western countries participants in the war and as such legitimate targets.
Naturally, the article’s assertions were unquestioning echoed by European media outlets, particularly in Spain, Italy and France. An article in La Razon even discussed possible drone strike targets, including ports, industries and military bases. This despite the fact that neither the CIA nor the governments of the three countries have confirmed the article’s claims.
Indeed, Italy’s Defence Minister Guido Crosetto described the claims as “completely unsubstantiated” while French President Emmanuel Macron said that the CIA “had not informed the French services” of a possible Russian attack on southern France.
The El Mundo article cites as sources an unidentified Lithuanian defence official and unnamed European functionaries, mostly in the Baltics. Russia’s alleged plan, they claim, would involve concealing Gerbera drones inside shipping containers and launching them from international waters. From there, the drones could reach targets hundreds of kilometres inland.
Some articles even included handy maps showing which French, Italian, or Spanish cities would line in range of the (for now, purely hypothetical) drones, including Barcelona (from where I’m writing), Madrid, Toulouse, Lyon, Rome, Naples and Genoa.
El Mundo claims the CIA shared the intelligence with European governments following CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent visit to Moscow. According to the European security officials cited in the article, such attacks could be designed to further dampen public support for Ukraine, create divisions within NATO and/or increase public anxiety without triggering a full-scale war.
The story, however, is so fanciful and riddled with holes that it could have been written by James Wormold, though some might argue that Wormold would do a better job. [1] Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t be believed by millions of French, Spanish and Italian citizens subjected to the full blast of repetitive messaging. As Joseph Goebbels once said, “a lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”
One of the main holes in the El Mundo story is the near-complete absence of motive: why would Putin attack Italy or Spain, two of the countries where both official and public support for the war in Ukraine and general antagonism towards Russia are relatively weak. Just a couple of months ago, Italy’s Meloni government rejected outright the idea of sending troops to Ukrainian territory, insisting that the country “is not at war with Russia”.
In his speech at this week’s UN General Assembly, Tajani reinforced this message, saying that while Italy “has condemned, and continues to condemn, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine” and “will continue to “support Ukraine for as long as necessary”, it is also working “for a just peace and for a future in which Russia can once again be a partner in dialogue rather than a threat to Europe”.
For many other governments in Europe, the idea of forging a new partnership with Russia when the war finally ends borders on blasphemy.
For its part, Spain appears to have much bigger fish to fry on its southern doorstep, where Morocco is waging a hybrid war against the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, with apparent US and Israeli support. While most Spaniards continue to support helping Ukraine financially and with equipment, the Spanish public has little appetite for actual war, as underscored in El Pais‘ recent article, “Would You Fight for Your Country?”.
As readers may recall, Spain is one of the few NATO members to have categorically refused to commit to the 5% NATO defence spending target demanded by Trump. Meanwhile, Morocco and Israel have upgraded their diplomatic ties and agreed to expand air travel and reinstate direct flights between the two countries. The Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife describes the move as “risky and deeply destabilising” for the Strait of Gibraltar.
If Morocco’s migrant invasion of Ceuta on July 30 was indeed an act of hybrid war, supported by the US and Israel, could this new threat of Russian drone attacks on Spanish targets be part of the same war? Absolutely, though we have no proof that that is the case.
The Pedro Sánchez government has been one of the most vocal opponents not only of the US-Israeli war on Iran but also Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. That, as we have already seen, is enough to put a very large target on your back. As some commentators have pointed out, all three target countries named in the El Mundo article spoke out against Israel at the UN General Assembly.
The second major flaw in the El Mundo also has to do with motive. As The Islander discussed in detail in the tweet below, “why would Russia risk turning civilian shipping into disposable drone platforms when it already possesses far more effective ways of hitting anything it actually wants to hit?”
It’s worth clicking through to read the tweet in full:
The key part:
Why would Moscow take merchant vessels that need access to ports, insurance, narrow straits and international shipping lanes and turn them into military launch platforms?
The moment a tanker or container ship becomes associated with drone strikes, every port becomes a potential inspection point. Every chokepoint becomes a problem. Every Russian linked vessel becomes a candidate for detention. And that includes the Bosphorus.
For Russia, keeping commercial shipping moving is strategically valuable in its own right. Putting drone launchers aboard those vessels would hand Europe an argument for treating the entire fleet as a security threat rather than simply a sanctions issue. [2]
Europe is already saturated with reports of “mysterious drones,” sabotage plots, and hybrid warfare. At the same time, pressure on Russia’s so called shadow fleet is intensifying, with the latest US sanctions legislation explicitly targeting the tanker network used to keep Russian energy exports moving. Then almost perfectly on cue, comes another ingredient: Russian commercial ships may actually be floating drone bases. How convenient.
Yet we are asked to believe Moscow’s next great innovation is to jeopardize commercially useful ships by converting them into improvised drone carriers. It just doesn’t fly (pardon the pun).
Of course, it was only three weeks ago that German authorities were claiming that Russia was behind a slapstick attempt to attack Ukrainian cargo planes at Leipzig airport involving explosives-laden. Putin ridiculed the claim, arguing that it was instead a false flag. The timing was certainly curious, coming just days before East German elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin.
Yet as Andrew Korkybo pointed out in an article cross-posted here, “while sceptics might roll their eyes, the Leipzig incident does bear all the hallmarks of a false flag attack”:
For starters, Germany is implying cartoonish incompetence on the part of Russia. The public is supposed to believe that the most skilled drone operators in the world, who were tasked with what would have been the most sensational Hybrid War attack on NATO ever, left a drone on the tarmac, got unlucky when another failed to explode after it hit a landing cargo plane, and left another nearby. That’s difficult to believe.
The second point to make in support of Putin’s hypothesis is that something similar happened last fall when unknown drones forced major airports in Scandinavia to temporarily ground all flights. Zelensky predictably blamed Russia and called for closing the Danish Straits to its shipping. As with the Leipzig incident, no evidence was ever shared in support of that claim, but it served as the precedent to blame Russia for mysterious drone-related incidents in Europe in order to justify more escalations against it.
Interestingly, yesterday’s editorial in El Mundo, titled “The Russian Threat to Spain”, described Leipzig as “a turning point” for Europe. At this precise moment, it’s anyone’s guess what motives and objectives actually lie behind the El Mundo “story” on Russian drones in the Med.
It could be just that — a fanciful story confected to distract the masses with fear porn about the ever-looming Russian threat. After all, the people of Europe are not going to demand more defence and less welfare spending of their own accord, not without a little prodding. Or it could be something more sinister — a massive psychological operation intended to prepare Southern Europeans for an upcoming false flag attack, or attacks, that will be blamed on Russia…
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