Copenhagen at the Edge: Drones, Diplomacy and the Shape of European Defence
The light over Copenhagen that morning had a brittle clarity—pale sun sliding off the Baltic, gulls arguing above the harbour, and a low hum of conversation as leaders poured into the glass-and-steel conference venue. Beneath the ritual of handshakes and translators, something else was stirring: a palpable unease about how Europe’s wars are changing, and who will pick up the bill.
France’s seizure of a Benin-flagged oil tanker in French waters a few hours before the summit felt like a scene from a spy thriller. French troops, acting at sea, boarded the vessel suspected of being a launch point for the small, winged machines that had recently forced the closure of airports—including Copenhagen’s—and sent ripples of alarm from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
“We arrested two crew members,” France’s Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu told journalists later, his voice dry with the kind of understatement that belies urgency. “They failed to provide proof of nationality and did not comply with orders.” On the quay, a dockworker who had watched the boarding unfold all morning shook his head. “You never think you’ll see soldiers on a tanker here,” he said. “It makes the world feel smaller and meaner at the same time.”
A new kind of wall
Out of those tensions came a single phrase that dominated the conversations: “drone wall.” The idea is as straightforward as it is ambitious—an EU-wide network for sensing, tracking and, if necessary, neutralising hostile drones that cross European airspace. Detection nodes, shared radar data, common rules of engagement: think of it as an aerial neighborhood watch, but one with teeth.
Leaders at the summit expressed support for the blueprint in principle. But as with every complex defence initiative, support leaves room for squabbles, budgets and legal knotwork. The proposal will be debated further in the coming weeks, and diplomats cautioned it would face tough negotiations before any formal adoption.
“They’re threatening us, and they are testing us, and they will not stop,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said bluntly, capturing the mood. Her words echoed around the chamber and outside it: a police drone hovered above the venue like a mechanical gull, recording the assembly below.
What would a “drone wall” look like?
Experts sketch a layered system.
- Distributed sensors around borders and key infrastructure (radar, radio-frequency detectors, optical systems).
- A centralised data-sharing hub to merge streams in real time, so one country’s sensors protect many.
- Rules and mechanisms for identifying and neutralising threats—jamming, capture, or kinetic removal—while respecting civil liberties and international law.
“Technically it’s feasible. Politically it’s the hard part,” said Anna Petrovic, a security analyst who has worked on airspace integration projects. “You need interoperability, shared intelligence, and a common legal framework that lets one country act in another’s airspace without turning every incident into a diplomatic crisis.”
From hybrid skirmishes to headline arrests
These drone incidents are not isolated curiosities. Estonia and Poland have reported high-profile aerial incursions. There is a growing narrative—one voiced repeatedly in Copenhagen—that Russia’s assault on Ukraine is bleeding into neighbouring skies, ports and communications networks in a form of hybrid warfare. Sabotage, disinformation, and these aerial probes together blur the line between battlefield and everyday life.
In the marketplace near Christianshavn, a teacher named Lukas tapped his phone and said, “We used to worry about big things—tanks, sanctions. Now it’s the little things that keep you up: a drone at night, an airport closed on a whim. It’s subtle and it’s terrifying.” His neighbour, a pastry chef, added wryly, “We never thought our croissants would be delivered with air-defence advisories.”
Money on the table—and the politics that block it
Beyond the immediate threat of drones, the summit also wrestled with one of the trickier questions of the moment: how to sustain Ukraine financially in a long war. A plan floated openly in Copenhagen would transform frozen Russian assets into a €140 billion loan to underwrite Kyiv’s defence and budget shortfalls.
“It is only fair that Russia pays for its violation and destruction,” Prime Minister Frederiksen told the room. “Our support to Ukraine is a direct investment in our own security, and therefore we have to deliver long term financing of Ukraine’s armed forces.”
That sounds tidy on paper, but the plan bumps against two major realities. First, the legal architecture of asset freezes is complex; the majority of these frozen assets—large swathes of which are housed in Belgian banks and registries—are subject to national and EU rules. Second, political appetite is uneven. Belgium, which holds a substantial portion of the freeze, has been hesitant; other capitals worry about the precedent of repurposing seized assets into loans.
“We can’t let any single country carry the political or legal risk alone,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned, promising intensified talks. Observers note that even if the numbers add up, the optics will be delicate: is Europe seizing assets, or genuinely making Russia incur the costs of its aggression? Both positions have powerful emotional resonance for voters across the continent.
The elephant in the room: enlargement and energy
At the heart of the summit’s friction was a persistent thorn: Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a long-time skeptic of rapid enlargement, reiterated his opposition to changing the EU’s accession rules, a move Kyiv says is necessary to prevent a single state from vetoing progress at every step.
“It would mean, first, that war would come into the European Union,” Mr Orbán said. “Second, money from the European Union would go to Ukraine.” His blunt “no” to the prospect of a near-term EU membership was a reminder that solidarity is often a feeling rather than a policy—easy in rhetoric, much harder in practice.
Energy politics hovered over these debates. Hungary—and to a lesser extent Slovakia—still receives Russian oil via pipeline, a fact that complicates any push to cut ties. Former US President Donald Trump has publicly urged NATO allies to stop buying Moscow’s fossil fuels, aligning with a strand of Western policy that sees economic pressure as central. But for landlocked countries with constrained choices, disentanglement is not a simple flip of a switch.
What this all adds up to
There is no neat resolution coming out of Copenhagen. The leaders agreed on principles: better protection of airspace, more support for Ukraine, and grimmer appreciation that Europe’s security patchwork needs mending. But agreement on principles is not the same as agreement on price, legal tools, or the timeline for action.
So we are left with a few hard questions: What level of intrusion will a continent accept before it acts decisively? Who pays when politics and war collide? And how do democracies build the technical, legal and moral infrastructure to repel threats that don’t announce themselves at the borders?
Walking back from the summit hall as dusk thickened, a Slovak journalist summed it up: “We can paper over differences for a day. But these are tests, and tests reveal your wiring. The real job is to fix the circuits so the lights don’t go out when the next storm hits.”
Whether Europe’s new “drone wall” becomes reality will depend on that wiring—on whether leaders can translate urgency into solidarity, and whether the EU can turn a brittle consensus into durable defense. For now, Copenhagen was less an ending than a waypoint: a charged reminder that the rules of the game have changed, and that every corner of the continent—harbours, airports, parliamentary chambers—may soon feel the consequences.
