What happened at Leipzig airport last Tuesday night was different. A bus driver at the East German airport noticed something hovering just above the southern runway, beside a Ukrainian cargo aircraft. He kicked it out of the air. Then he called security, and the federal police sent a robot. It found a tin can fixed to the drone with a detonator seated in its base.
The can held about 800 grams of Semtex, a plastic explosive stable enough to carry in a pocket and powerful enough to blow up an aircraft. The only reason it failed was because the detonator was faulty.
This was quite obviously not something done by amateurs. The target makes this incident especially unsettling. Leipzig is NATO’s airlift hub from which supplies are flown to allied units from Finland to Romania.
Leipzig airport is also the main gateway for Western weapons reaching Ukraine. That the drone was discovered next to a Ukrainian aircraft suggests an intention to disrupt that gateway.
As a military logistics hub, getting a drone into the airspace should not have been easy. Yet apparently, the drone had flown into the secured grounds hours earlier and then sat there for hours unnoticed. At least that is what investigators are saying.
What they cannot say yet is who is behind the attack drone. Or maybe they do not want to say it out aloud.
Germany’s federal prosecutor has taken over the case, which happens only when there is suspicion of terrorism. Meanwhile, the federal government’s response has been cautious. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt talked about “a new kind of threat” and said only that “foreign powers” could not be ruled out. But he did not say “Russia.”
Even though the circumstances make Russian involvement look plausible, there is no easy way of proving it. Semtex is widely used in quarries, the tin can could be from any supermarket, and you can buy drones at an electronics shop. There is no smoking gun in any of this.
What points to Moscow though is the pattern, not least because Leipzig has been hit before. In July 2024, someone posted four parcels from Vilnius, each carrying an incendiary device. One of them caught fire in the DHL depot at Leipzig inside a container of 140 others.
The parcel was waiting to be loaded onto a flight to Britain that got delayed. A DHL manager told a court in Vilnius last week that the aircraft had been due out at 5.30am and the device went off at 5.43am. Five men are on trial, and Lithuanian prosecutors say the parcels came from Russians working for Russian intelligence.
That same investigation turned up something else. One of the accused, a Ukrainian, is said to have dug up a cache that Russian military intelligence had buried in a Lithuanian cemetery.
Inside were drone parts and ordinary cans of corn packed with explosives. The plan, according to Poland’s security services, was to hang the cans beneath the drones and fly them at Düsseldorf during the 2024 European football championship.
Again, none of that is proof of Russian involvement, but German counterintelligence has said that the work was too professional for another author. At the same time, using conventional ingredients offers a foreign actor plausible deniability.
As a result, the incident has been simultaneously escalated and downplayed. The German government talks about unnamed “foreign powers”, while Moscow has pre-emptively claimed it had nothing to do with it. The only attribution so far came from an anonymous American defence official who told CNN that US intelligence had assessed the drone belonged to a Russian intelligence service.
Even if Russia’s involvement could be proven, there are good reasons why Berlin might want to downplay the act. It is not at all clear how Germany should respond.
The obvious response route would be through the NATO treaty, which says an attack on one member is an attack on all. That is NATO’s Article 5 which has been used precisely once in seventy-seven years, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, which was deemed an “armed attack”. Yet Leipzig with its single tin of unexploded Semtex may fall short of that threshold.
That leaves NATO’s Article 4. It is a lesser instrument, letting any member call the others in for talks in cases that do not meet Article 5 requirements. Last year, Poland and Estonia used it after Russian aircraft crossed their borders (“How NATO failed Putin’s drone test”, 16 September 2025).
NATO allies duly met, expressed concern and went home. Yes, NATO did launch a new air defence mission along its eastern flank, called Eastern Sentry, afterwards. But nothing whatever happened to Russia. Would it be any different this time? Hardly.
There is a reason for that lack of a proper response. The moment a NATO government says Russia is attacking it, that government must act. No German, Polish or Estonian leader can tell their people they are under attack and then fail to respond.
Germany could hardly respond in kind, say by attempting terrorist attacks inside Russia or launching cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure. These are the methods of a regime like Russia’s. Liberal democracies should not sink to that level.
The only options available to Western countries are sanctions and diplomatic pressure. But there have been dozens of sanctions passed already. Russian consulates have been closed and Russian diplomats expelled. Berlin could continue down that path, but it does not seem to have impressed Putin much so far.
There is yet one more complication for the federal government, and that is timing. On 6 September, there will be elections in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right AfD is polling above 40 percent. Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern follow a fortnight later, again with substantial gains predicted for the AfD.
The AfD has claimed that Germany’s support for Ukraine will get it drawn into a conflict with Russia. The party wants to normalise relations with Moscow and even revive Germany’s gas imports from Russia.
If the federal government blamed Russia for the attempted attack on a Ukrainian plane in Leipzig, it would only play into the hands of the AfD. It could say it was vindicated in its warnings of Germany becoming involved in the Ukraine war. And indeed, evoking that political response may have been as much the goal as attacking supplies to Ukraine.
And so, Berlin will say nothing, and it is probably right not to. But Moscow will take that silence as encouragement. And it will not be wrong either.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
This was quite obviously not something done by amateurs. The target makes this incident especially unsettling. Leipzig is NATO’s airlift hub from which supplies are flown to allied units from Finland to Romania.
Leipzig airport is also the main gateway for Western weapons reaching Ukraine. That the drone was discovered next to a Ukrainian aircraft suggests an intention to disrupt that gateway.
As a military logistics hub, getting a drone into the airspace should not have been easy. Yet apparently, the drone had flown into the secured grounds hours earlier and then sat there for hours unnoticed. At least that is what investigators are saying.
What they cannot say yet is who is behind the attack drone. Or maybe they do not want to say it out aloud.
Germany’s federal prosecutor has taken over the case, which happens only when there is suspicion of terrorism. Meanwhile, the federal government’s response has been cautious. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt talked about “a new kind of threat” and said only that “foreign powers” could not be ruled out. But he did not say “Russia.”
Even though the circumstances make Russian involvement look plausible, there is no easy way of proving it. Semtex is widely used in quarries, the tin can could be from any supermarket, and you can buy drones at an electronics shop. There is no smoking gun in any of this.
What points to Moscow though is the pattern, not least because Leipzig has been hit before. In July 2024, someone posted four parcels from Vilnius, each carrying an incendiary device. One of them caught fire in the DHL depot at Leipzig inside a container of 140 others.
The parcel was waiting to be loaded onto a flight to Britain that got delayed. A DHL manager told a court in Vilnius last week that the aircraft had been due out at 5.30am and the device went off at 5.43am. Five men are on trial, and Lithuanian prosecutors say the parcels came from Russians working for Russian intelligence.
That same investigation turned up something else. One of the accused, a Ukrainian, is said to have dug up a cache that Russian military intelligence had buried in a Lithuanian cemetery.
Inside were drone parts and ordinary cans of corn packed with explosives. The plan, according to Poland’s security services, was to hang the cans beneath the drones and fly them at Düsseldorf during the 2024 European football championship.
Again, none of that is proof of Russian involvement, but German counterintelligence has said that the work was too professional for another author. At the same time, using conventional ingredients offers a foreign actor plausible deniability.
As a result, the incident has been simultaneously escalated and downplayed. The German government talks about unnamed “foreign powers”, while Moscow has pre-emptively claimed it had nothing to do with it. The only attribution so far came from an anonymous American defence official who told CNN that US intelligence had assessed the drone belonged to a Russian intelligence service.
Even if Russia’s involvement could be proven, there are good reasons why Berlin might want to downplay the act. It is not at all clear how Germany should respond.
The obvious response route would be through the NATO treaty, which says an attack on one member is an attack on all. That is NATO’s Article 5 which has been used precisely once in seventy-seven years, after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, which was deemed an “armed attack”. Yet Leipzig with its single tin of unexploded Semtex may fall short of that threshold.
That leaves NATO’s Article 4. It is a lesser instrument, letting any member call the others in for talks in cases that do not meet Article 5 requirements. Last year, Poland and Estonia used it after Russian aircraft crossed their borders (“How NATO failed Putin’s drone test”, 16 September 2025).
NATO allies duly met, expressed concern and went home. Yes, NATO did launch a new air defence mission along its eastern flank, called Eastern Sentry, afterwards. But nothing whatever happened to Russia. Would it be any different this time? Hardly.
There is a reason for that lack of a proper response. The moment a NATO government says Russia is attacking it, that government must act. No German, Polish or Estonian leader can tell their people they are under attack and then fail to respond.
Germany could hardly respond in kind, say by attempting terrorist attacks inside Russia or launching cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure. These are the methods of a regime like Russia’s. Liberal democracies should not sink to that level.
The only options available to Western countries are sanctions and diplomatic pressure. But there have been dozens of sanctions passed already. Russian consulates have been closed and Russian diplomats expelled. Berlin could continue down that path, but it does not seem to have impressed Putin much so far.
There is yet one more complication for the federal government, and that is timing. On 6 September, there will be elections in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right AfD is polling above 40 percent. Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern follow a fortnight later, again with substantial gains predicted for the AfD.
The AfD has claimed that Germany’s support for Ukraine will get it drawn into a conflict with Russia. The party wants to normalise relations with Moscow and even revive Germany’s gas imports from Russia.
If the federal government blamed Russia for the attempted attack on a Ukrainian plane in Leipzig, it would only play into the hands of the AfD. It could say it was vindicated in its warnings of Germany becoming involved in the Ukraine war. And indeed, evoking that political response may have been as much the goal as attacking supplies to Ukraine.
And so, Berlin will say nothing, and it is probably right not to. But Moscow will take that silence as encouragement. And it will not be wrong either.
Dr Oliver Hartwich is the Executive Director of The New Zealand Initiative think tank. This article was first published HERE.
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