Just before Eveline Buchatskiy left Kyiv last weekend, Russia unleashed nearly 600 drones and dozens of missiles against Ukraine, killing four people. Such bombardments have become an “everyday reality” in Ukraine, the managing partner of the D3 defence tech fund told the Resilience conference in London on Monday. But how, Buchatskiy asked, would London handle a similar attack?
Such terrors have been preying on the minds of Nato officials amid escalating tensions with Moscow and recent incursions into Polish and Danish airspace by drones, presumed to be Russian. In response, several Nato countries have been urgently redeploying air defence systems to central Europe. But, as the FT has reported, the Russians are becoming increasingly adept at evading even the best anti-missile systems.
Air defence shot to the top of the political agenda in Copenhagen this week with European leaders discussing the creation of a regional drone wall to help counter the multipronged Russian threat. “The idea of a hybrid war is to threaten us, to divide us, to destabilise us. To use drones one day, cyber attacks the next day, sabotage on the third day,” the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, told the FT.