The bold Operation Spiderweb, which ended with two dozen Russian strategic bombers crushed and in flames over 4,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian front, offered on June 1 of this same year a series of Trojan horse-like military possibilities unexplored until then. If the military minds of Kiev had managed to hide commercial drones in trucks to release them next to Russian airfield runways, it means that any unnoticed platform can be used as a mothership for these unmanned aircraft.
The first evidence that something similar is happening came from September 7 to 10: German police and special forces boarded the Scanlark freighter at the Kiel-Holtenau lock, suspecting it launched a drone that flew over and photographed a German frigate on August 26. The Flensburg Prosecutor's Office is investigating a possible mobile drone base; the case is part of the hundreds of suspicious flights near critical German infrastructure during the year 2025.
The second incident occurred on Monday, September 22: several "large drones" caused the closure of Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen and forced the cancellation or diversion of 150 flights. Danish state television channel TV2 leaked information from its security forces stating that three ships are suspected of launching one or more drones of a certain size.
These three vessels are: the sanctioned Russian freighter Astrol 1 that sailed through the Öresund strait that same Monday and performed several irregular maneuvers; the tanker Pushpa, also sanctioned by the EU, sailing under the flag of Benin, was monitored for four hours by a NATO German ship. The last one is the Norwegian freighter Oslo Carrier 3, which was seven kilometers from Kastrup Airport while the drones were being pursued. Although this ship is not sanctioned as part of Moscow's so-called "ghost fleet," the shipowner has the office in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Did the Russians come up with this idea? No. Their partner, Iran, has already converted old container carrier freighters into drone motherships (the ships Shahid Mahdavi and Shahid Bagheri) and has shown them operating drones and weaponry from their deck after militarization; clear examples of civilian merchant ships transformed into drone platforms.
The Russian ghost fleet - a network of opaque tankers created to circumvent Western sanctions - has gone from being an energy problem to a vector of hybrid warfare in the Baltic Sea: its ships are attributed with reconnaissance and sabotage operations, and according to European authorities and media, they could have served not only as launch and control platforms for drones but also to destroy submarine communication cables. Finland has charged the captain and two officers of the tanker Eagle S - identified as part of the ghost fleet - for cutting five submarine cables between Finland and Estonia on December 25, 2024, after dragging an anchor about 90 kilometers. This is the first criminal case of its kind in NATO. The pattern, documented by the press and think tanks, places these tankers at the center of a gray zone that combines energy logistics, intelligence, and sabotage in international waters, complicating attribution and allied response.
In that sense, turning sanctioned tankers into drone motherships and bases for sabotage activities cheapens and disguises gray zone operations, while pressuring the EU and NATO to cover a legal and operational gap in international waters. The new sanctions and the increase in military patrols in the area reflect that the Baltic Sea has already become a theater of hybrid warfare.
One of the best analysts of these gray zone strategies, Mark Galeotti, argues that in the "new form of warfare," everything can be militarized, including civilian platforms (ships, airports, networks, companies), to operate below the threshold and with plausible deniability. He speaks of the "weaponization of inconvenience": sabotage and disturbances that force the diversion of resources and erode Western political will. As an example, he describes how an "out-of-control" tanker can be presented as an accident while acting as an instrument of coercion, and adds that Moscow subcontracts radicals and criminals for these hybrid attacks in Europe. His recipe: think about effects more than means.