Germany is facing an escalating campaign of hybrid warfare, its interior minister has warned, following a series of drone incidents that have raised alarm across Europe. Alexander Dobrindt, Germany's interior minister, told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag that foreign powers were targeting Germany on a daily basis through espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks, and covert operations aimed at destabilising the country and stirring up fear among its population. "We're not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid warfare," Dobrindt said, without naming any specific country as responsible.

The warning comes after an explosive-laden drone was discovered on the runway of Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany — a strategically significant hub used by NATO, the German military, and Ukraine's Antonov Airlines, which operates some of the world's largest cargo aircraft to support Ukraine's war effort. Days later, Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, confirmed that two further drones were spotted on Thursday evening over a military base in Mechernich, a town near Bonn in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The base is reported to house components and spare parts for Patriot air-defence systems — the missile batteries that have become critical to Ukraine's ability to intercept Russian ballistic missiles since Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022. In response to the growing threat, Germany is planning to double its federal anti-drone expert team from 150 to 300 specialists and expand its network of counter-drone bases from four to eight.

A separate incident occurred in Bulgaria, a NATO member state on the Black Sea, where a drone exploded near the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline on Saturday. Bulgaria's defence ministry said the drone appeared to be a Ukrainian-operated type that may have been diverted by GPS jamming or spoofing — electronic warfare techniques in which signals are either drowned out or falsified to redirect unmanned aircraft from their intended routes. Experts in electronic warfare note that GPS signals, arriving weakly from satellites roughly 20,000 kilometres above Earth, are relatively easy to disrupt without specialised equipment. Baltic states including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which border Russia and Belarus, have been most frequently affected by such disruptions, with effects spilling over into civilian life including GPS-dependent agricultural machinery.

Security analysts and European officials have pointed to a broader pattern: as Ukraine's long-range drone strikes increasingly damage Russian energy infrastructure, military logistics, and arms production deep inside Russian territory, Moscow appears to be intensifying pressure on the Western countries that support Kyiv. Some analysts describe this as an attempt to target what military strategists call Ukraine's "centre of gravity" — the financial, military, and political support flowing from Europe. Russian officials have consistently denied involvement in the European drone incidents, with Moscow's embassy in Berlin dismissing the Leipzig episode as a "fabricated provocation."

The cluster of incidents has renewed a debate across NATO and the European Union about whether adequate defences exist against this form of low-intensity, deniable aggression. The EU previously discussed establishing a continent-wide "drone wall" of air defences following a wave of unexplained drone sightings last year. For now, the incidents serve a dual psychological purpose even when physical damage is limited: they expose gaps in state protection and, as Dobrindt acknowledged, are designed to sow fear and uncertainty among European populations at a critical juncture in the war.