On the evening of September 9-10, about 20 Russian drones violated Polish airspace, triggering the first ever joint response to an attack on NATO territory. Hours later, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gave her annual State of the Union address. “We must heed the call of our Baltic friends and build a drone wall,” she said in Brussels. Later that day, she described the wall as “a European capability developed together, deployed together, and sustained together, that can respond in real time. One that leaves no ambiguity as to our intentions.” The European Commission now plans to have a drone wall fully operational along the European Union’s eastern border with Russia and Belarus by the end of 2027.
It was a remarkable shift—only last spring the EU had rejected an initial Baltic proposal on the drone wall. The announcement also caused confusion: What exactly is a drone wall? The commission hasn’t made its plans public, and there isn’t yet a specific new financial commitment, leading to questions about what it is—and isn’t.
For starters, the proposed drone wall isn’t a physical barrier. It will also need far more upkeep than a wall that needs paint every now and then. Given the rapid cycles of drone innovation in the Russo-Ukrainian War, defenses will have to adapt quickly. Most broadly conceived, a drone wall would be an interoperable, multilayered system of systems across the EU-Russia and EU-Belarus border to detect, track, jam, and if needed, intercept incoming drones.
While frontline EU and NATO member states have embraced the drone wall, the idea has caused skepticism on the part of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. Macron said that he was “wary” of the idea, while Pistorius argued that it wouldn’t be ready in the next three to four years. “Drone defense, of course, but not by a drone wall,” Pistorius said at the Warsaw Security Forum in late September.
Limits of the Concept
The drone wall debate reveals the limits of the concept and how differing EU member states view security depending on their geography. Despite disagreement over the drone wall, there is wide unity among EU member states that more defensive systems—and more money for them—are needed against drones. While EU frontline states view their largest threat as countering a drone incursion from Russia or Belarus, a surge in drone sightings at airports in cities such as Copenhagen and Berlin—believed to be Russian hybrid warfare—is a more immediate threat for interior states.
According to Reuters, the European Commission proposed expanding the concept after non-frontline states felt left out of the plan. In her public remarks, von der Leyen has linked the airport incidents and the drone wall. However, the drone wall is not a solution for defending critical infrastructure and airports because unlike incursions into Poland and Romania, these drones aren't generally launched from Russia or Belarus, said Ulrike Franke, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a leading expert on drones. “It has become a silver bullet to all of our security questions. That is wrong, because these are different challenges,” Franke told the DGAP Morning Briefing on November 20. (A drone wall would not protect against conventional or cyberattacks, either.)
However, contrary to Pistorius, Franke believed that the timeline was realistic, because many of the systems that would constitute it, like radars and acoustic detection, are already in use or could be modified easily. “The timeline is ambitious, but not impossible, because there are quite a few systems for drone detection and countermeasures [already in use],” she said. “I think we will end up with a kind of drone wall operated by the national militaries,” she added, noting that interoperability was crucial along the 3,500-kilometer border with Russia and Belarus.
Getting Ready
Given that states closer to Russia and Ukraine are dealing with repeated incursions, it’s no surprise that Baltic states are moving ahead with the plan. Estonian and Latvian startups have begun developing systems for the drone wall. Sandis Šrāders, Director for Defense Technology and Innovations at Riga Technical University, said his department was training civilians in how to counter drones. “Defense is always more sophisticated than offense,” he said. “We are improving our products, exchanging experiences and bringing the best scientists together to make sure that we keep up with the technological development to counter Russian attacks,” he told IPQ at the Defending Baltics Conference 2025, which took place on November 17-18 in Vilnius, Lithuania, sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
A low-cost drone wall would likely be cheaper than using aircraft and air defenses to shoot down drones. In the September attack on Poland, F-35 fighter jet pilots hit Russian drones with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. The launch of one such missile, as the German tabloid Bild loudly complained, costs more than €400,000, while Russian Shahed drones cost around $20,000, and decoys—which the Russians used on Poland—are even cheaper. Shooting down cheap drones with air defense missiles is also expensive. Legacy Western air defense systems are in short supply globally due to years of underproduction and high demand.
Despite the uncertainty around its rollout, it’s clear that a drone wall—or something like it—is needed to defend an increasingly aggressive Russia, as hybrid attacks are likely to continue and possibly intensify in coming months. Still, questions remain over whether the EU, NATO, or national governments would have command and control over such systems, as well as what the scope and funding of the project is.
Some of those questions may be cleared up at the European Council's end-of-year summit on December 18-19. Yet, what to call drone defense may be less important than actually investing in it. Former Lithuanian Defense Secretary Dovilė Šakalienė said last month: “We have a lot of different names for a lot of different formats. I wish we’d have as much money—that would be much more helpful.”
Luke Johnson is a freelance reporter living in Berlin, who frequently writes about Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
