Almost midnight in late August, the driver was ferrying pilots on the night shift when he spotted drone debris beside a Ukrainian Antonov aircraft at Leipzig Airport, one of Europe's busiest cargo hubs. He approached the wreckage and kicked at the pieces, unaware that a vegetable soup can among the debris was packed with 600 grams of Semtex, enough to produce a fireball capable of obliterating everything within 10 metres.
Airport police who arrived 30 minutes later found two more drones carrying more than a kilogram of high-powered explosives. CCTV footage showed the drones had flown directly into the wing of the Antonov, which had just taken on 25,000 litres of jet fuel. The payload failed to detonate. Officials say if the plot had succeeded, dozens of people could have died.
German intelligence quickly concluded Russia was responsible. The attack is part of a broader campaign that European intelligence officials say has involved at least 200 hybrid strikes in 2026, a number NATO suspects understates the scale once hundreds of attempted cyber attacks and multiple suspicious fires across Europe are counted. Russian tactics range from drone incursions over restricted airspace to cyber attacks on state infrastructure and the physical sabotage of undersea cables and oil pipelines.
Colonel Johan Schmid, a senior officer in the German armed forces and a leading authority on Russian hybrid aggression, said the campaign had become more frequent and more violent. "We have seen a significant intensification of these hybrid attacks regarding numbers and regarding the escalation of violence," he said. "By attacking Germany and other nations within NATO, Russia is implementing a price on us, on the West, for its support towards Ukraine."
Schmid said Western nations had been slow to grasp the threat. "From 2014 to the time of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hybrid warfare wasn't taken seriously enough," he said. "It took the military escalation by Russia in Ukraine to really wake everyone up."
He warned that for eight years before the invasion, plausible deniability was central to Moscow's approach, which relied on proxy actors as well as direct action, and that many countries remained unprepared for hybrid attacks.