Two things were clear when chancellor Friedrich Merz halted his holidays on Friday for an emergency top-secret meeting.
First: Germany had a very lucky escape on Tuesday night, when a defective detonator was all that prevented a Semtex-packed drone from exploding at Leipzig airport, with potentially devastating consequences.
Second: Germany’s best defence against this growing security threat was not airport police, radar or even anti-drone weapons – but a fast-thinking airport bus driver.
Just before midnight on Tuesday evening, the unnamed night-shift bus driver spotted the drone a few metres away from Ukrainian military transport planes. He raised the alarm, all flights were halted and a bomb-detecting robot was rushed out to secure the drone. Minutes later, a similar drone collided mid-air with a cargo plane just six kilometres from the airport.
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Though German politicians and police have chosen their words carefully, there is a growing suspicion that Russian or Russian-allied agents could have been behind the attack. Whoever the perpetrator was, even without an explosion, the drone incident has been a success, triggering a familiar and ineffective pattern of alarm, organised irresponsibility and blame-shifting.
Federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt overlooked the broken detonator and eagle-eyed bus driver to insist the disaster was averted because airport “security measures clearly worked”.
[ The Irish Times view on Europe’s air defences: concerning vulnerabilitiesOpens in new window ]
Not everyone is sure about that. It’s four years since Leipzig, Germany’s second-largest freight airport, became a key transport hub for Ukrainian and Nato-member military flights after a previous base at Hostomel Airport near Kyiv was destroyed by Russian strikes.
Despite previous alarms in Leipzig involving drones and explosive packages, the airport in Saxony is still waiting for extra security equipment to reflect its new status as a key military hub.
Last year Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s biggest aviation hub, got an anti-drone system upgrade. Similar state-of-the-art systems are set to go online in eight further airports by the end of 2026, according to reports, though some question that timeline given Munich airport has just completed its tender procedures.
Already, federal investigators are looking beyond the attempted drone attack.
They suspect insider knowledge may have helped perpetrators outwit existing Leipzig security systems to make the drone – effectively a flying bomb – invisible until the bus driver’s chance sighting.
Alongside doubts over Germany’s drone detection technology, disagreements persist over responsibility for downing the devices. There is a military-civilian row in one corner while, in the other, a scuffle between civilian state and federal officials.
German state authorities insist they will remain involved in drone detection because a 130-strong federal police unit, established last year, has yet to find its feet or prove its efficacy.
“We cannot wait any longer,” said Herbert Reul, interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. “We have to clarify who is responsible for German aviation security. State police, federal police and the military need to know who is allowed intervene – and when.”
The only certainty now is that Leipzig is the latest in a litany of drone alarms across Europe, with one study flagging 144 suspicious security incidents from August 2024 to February 2026 over European nuclear plants, military carriers and civilian airspace.
Latest US intelligence assessments of Russia, leaked to the Wall Street Journal on Friday, suggest such drone incidents are part of a wider Moscow plan to test Nato defences with a view to full military action against the alliance as early as this autumn.
Mindful of the growing threat, Berlin has invited all EU interior ministers to an emergency conference for the end of August in the northern German city of Flensburg.
