Russian drone incursions across Europe spark NATO concerns amid the Ukraine war
But the flurry of mysterious drone sightings over Europe in recent months has raised hackles among the continent’s leaders. Earlier this month, Belgium said UAVs were seen for three nights in a row over a military air base, while reported sightings above civilian airports in Germany, Sweden and Denmark earlier this year have forced them to temporarily halt flights.
Perhaps the most serious wake-up call came on the night of Sept. 9, when multiple Russian drones crossed into Poland in what European officials described as a deliberate provocation.
NATO said it shot down seven of them using F-35 fighter jets and interceptor missiles, during a seven-hour aerial battle — the first time that its forces had opened fire on Russian aircraft since the start of the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, “has put us on notice that we need to quickly build those steps of the ladder of the defense of our outer perimeter,” Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said in an interview in London last month.
Most of the downed drones were found to be unarmed decoys made of polystyrene and estimated to cost Russia only around $10,000 each. NATO’s response involved $80 million F-35s launching missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece.
It’s an imbalance in cost which Sikorski acknowledged was “not the most economical way of dealing with such a threat,” while the European Union has said cheaper, more agile technology must be a key part of the so-called “drone wall.”
“It’s just very hard to make any sense of firing a precision-guided missile towards a target that is at least 10 times cheaper than the means you intercept it with,” Kipurs said. “You have to turn it upside down. You have to be 10 times cheaper than the target you are intercepting.”
While his company would not reveal the cost of each interceptor, he said it was confident it could produce them cheaply enough to deal with large volumes of Russian drones. In the event that an operator aborts an interception, the drone will fly back to base ready to be used again — a potential major cost-saver.
Origin is one of a growing number of defense technology firms that have sprung up in the Nordic and Baltic nations, where proximity to Russia is a spark for innovation and most focus on lessons learned from the battlefields of Ukraine.
Dominic Surano, a director of special projects at Nordic Air Defence, a Sweden-based company said the mission was, “How can we thread that needle and drive down the cost per kill while still making something that is very functional?”
His firm is developing lightweight missiles to target drones, small enough to be mounted on a vehicle or fired from a handheld launcher by a soldier or a law enforcement officer protecting civilian infrastructure, like an airport. It is also testing its own autonomously guided interceptor drone.
