London — Britain is sending anti-drone equipment and personnel to Belgium after a spate of sightings near airports and military bases, the head of the U.K. military said Sunday.
While Belgium and the U.K. have not accused anyone of flying the unidentified drones, they’re the latest in a growing trend of airspace violations by mysterious aircraft in about half of a dozen European nations, including around NATO military bases, that at least one U.S. ally calls part of escalating Russian “hybrid warfare.”
In the past week Belgium’s main international airport in Brussels and one of Europe’s biggest cargo airports, near the Belgian city of Liege, were forced to close temporarily because of drone incursions. Before that, authorities reported a series of unidentified drone flights near a military base in Belgium where U.S. nuclear weapons are stored.
Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, the head of Britain’s armed forces, said over the weekend that the U.K. had agreed to “deploy our people, our equipment to Belgium to help them,” after a request from Belgian authorities.
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“We don’t know — and the Belgians don’t yet know — the source of those drones, but we will help them by providing our kit and capability, which has already started to deploy to help Belgium,” Knighton told the BBC.
U.K. Defense Secretary John Healey said the U.K. was sending a team of Royal Air Force specialists to NATO ally Belgium “to counter rogue drone activity.”
“As hybrid threats grow, our strength lies in our alliances and our collective resolve to defend, deter and protect our critical infrastructure and airspace,” he said.
Drones plague European airports amid rising tension with Russia
Drone incidents across Europe have forced airports to suspend flights many times in recent months. While Belgium has not said who it believes is operating the drones, Russia has been blamed in some cases by other NATO allies.
Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken said that he believed that some incidents were part of “a spying operation” that could not have been done by amateurs.
Belgium is home to the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, as well as Europe’s biggest financial clearinghouse holding tens of billions of euros in frozen Russian assets. Many EU countries want to use those assets as collateral to provide loans to Ukraine, but Belgium has so far resisted.
The most overt blame has been cast by Lithuania, a NATO member that accused Russia and its close ally Belarus at the end of October of escalating a hybrid war against Ukraine’s partners two-and-a-half years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Lithuania’s Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys said in an October 27 social media post that the U.S.-led NATO alliance was facing a “deliberate escalation of hybrid warfare from Russia and its proxy, Belarus,” calling the spate of recent airspace incursions, “calculated provocations designed to destabilize, distract and test NATO’s resolve.”
He called for further sanctions against Belarus and stronger NATO security measures to deter the airspace violations, as Lithuania’s prime minister warned that any further unidentified balloons entering the country’s airspace from Belarus would be shot down.
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Many of America’s European allies have had their airspace breached in recent weeks, mostly by unclaimed drones flying around airports and military facilities in Germany, Denmark and the Baltic states.
On October 23, a Russian Sukhoi SU-30 fighter and an IL-78 tanker plane flew just under half of a mile into Lithuanian territory, according to the country’s ministry of foreign affairs, after departing from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The Baltic Sea coastal territory is separate from the rest of Russia, and bordered on two sides by Lithuania and Poland.
Estonia accused Russian fighter jets of flying through its airspace for 12 minutes in mid-September. Russia denied entering the NATO member’s airspace and called the flight a routine training exercise.