Putin is flying spy drones over critical UK sites from his shadow fleet tankers

Vladimir Putin is launching spy drones from shadow fleet tankers and flying them above critical energy sites in his escalating hybrid warfare campaign against the UK and Europe, intelligence experts have warned.

While the shadow fleet provides an economic lifeline to Russia’s wartime economy, evidence points to the Kremlin increasingly “weaponising” the vessels by using them to carry out intelligence gathering and to target underwater energy and data cables.

Security guards recruited from Russia’s armed forces and intelligence services are now routinely being deployed on the ships, intelligence experts monitoring the tankers have discovered.

New EU border checks should be suspended before peak summer, aviation industry leaders have said, after Brits reported huge delays due to the new Entry/Exit System (EES). 

The system, rolled out fully in April, involves people from the UK having their fingerprints registered and photographs taken to enter certain countries.

The EES is used to enter the Schengen Area, which consists of 29 European countries, mainly in the EU.

For most UK travellers, the process is done at foreign airports.

Severe operational consequences disrupting passengers and putting border authorities, airports and airlines under unsustainable pressure.

Senior figures at three major aviation industry bodies wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission warning waiting times at border control had “increased significantly, now reaching up to five hours”.

Since it’s implementation, the EES has caused travel chaos for Brits.

Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with missiles and drones, killing at least 13 people and injuring dozens more.

Russia launched a series of strikes on Kyiv, hitting residential ⁠buildings and ⁠triggering ​a fire in a hotel on a central boulevard.

Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has said 13 people had been killed, ⁠with about three dozen locations across the city damaged in the attacks.

Many residents took shelter at metro stations after the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued the first warnings of the attack.

Zelenskyy was forced to cut short a trip to Dublin on Wednesday, citing intelligence reports of a large-scale Russian attack.

Ukraine said on Tuesday it hit one of Russia’s largest satellite communication centers in north Moscow for the second time in just over a week.

Russian president Vladimir Putin also recently admitted Russia is facing fuel shortages after Ukraine launched repeated strikes on oil refineries, while Kyiv notably launched a large-scale attack on Moscow last month.

Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.

American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.

A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.

The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.

Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.

Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.

Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.

One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.

Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.

A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.

The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.

Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.

Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.

Sources told The i Paper that there is a “close correlation” between drone flights and the movements of the shadow fleet or Russian commercial vessels.

Moscow generates revenues worth £156m a day from oil exports carried on a fleet of up to 1,300 ageing, sanctions-busting tankers making dozens of transits a week through British and European waters en route to and from Russian fossil fuel export hubs on the Baltic Sea.

Military planners fear that the Kremlin has drawn up a blueprint also to use clandestine merchant vessels, including oil tankers, to hit British and European targets in the event of a direct clash with Nato.

Among the potential tactics available to Moscow would be the use of special forces on board tankers to harass or sink Western civilian shipping and deploying drones or missiles concealed in shipping containers.

Several European countries, led by France, have in recent months stepped up seizures and boardings of shadow fleet vessels in an attempt to disrupt the flow of funds into the Kremlin’s war coffers. Earlier this month, British commandos seized an illegally flagged tanker in the English Channel. Meanwhile, France on Thursday announced the detention of another vessel off Sicily, bringing the total number of tanker seizures by European states since January to nine.

But at the same time, the shadow fleet is increasingly being used to hit back at Ukraine’s allies.

An analysis shared with The i Paper shows a steady intensification of incidents linked to the shadow fleet in the last 12 months – a phenomenon which it is now feared will continue to escalate in seas around the UK and northern Europe over the next two years as the Kremlin struggles in its war against Ukraine and Putin looks for new ways of inflicting pain on its backers.

ACLED, an independent conflict monitoring organisation, tracked 56 incidents involving drones potentially launched from shadow fleet vessels to surveil critical infrastructure from Germany to Ireland and Spain to Norway in the last 18 months, up from 31 in the previous three years – an 80 per cent increase.

Intelligence sources told The i Paper that there is a “close correlation” between drone overflights close to the European coastline, including over UK North Sea energy installations, and the movements of shadow fleet or Russian commercial vessels.

ACLED also tracked four incidents of damage to cables in the Baltic Sea, suspected of having been caused by Russian oil tankers, since the beginning of last year. At the same time, a Russian spy ship, the Yantar, has been routinely tracked in the English Channel and the North Sea, prompting a change to UK rules of engagement last year after the intelligence-gathering vessel shone lasers at an RAF surveillance aircraft.

Witold Stupnicki, a senior analyst for ACLED, said there was no doubt that Moscow is now using its shadow fleet as a “hybrid warfare platform” acting increasingly alongside Russian military vessels, and forming a persistent threat to UK and European security.

He said: “In the next one to two years, the threats will involve risks to undersea cables connecting northern European countries. Moreover, the shadow fleet will remain a platform for drone reconnaissance over critical infrastructure – driving further escalations.”

Intelligence experts say Russia is increasingly using its shadow fleet to make up for its limited surface fleet naval power in the Baltic, and that it may well be being used to help Moscow lay the groundwork for a military confrontation.

SWP, a German think-tank, warned last month that Europe was paying “too little attention” to the military threat posed by the shadow fleet. It said there was a likelihood that Russia-linked vessels were being used to gather vast amounts of intelligence on the procedures and response times of countries, including the UK, to events such as damage to underwater infrastructure.

Julian Pawlak, a defence expert for SWP, said: “The [shadow] fleet is expanding the threat spectrum. It cannot be ruled out that sabotage and espionage are being used as preparatory measures or to support potential military actions.”

Defence sources pointed to a growing pattern of discoveries of eavesdropping or espionage equipment, as well as additional security personnel not normally found on merchant vessels, on board shadow fleet tankers and freighters.

Last September, German authorities raided the Scanlark, a Russian-crewed cargo vessel and recovered items including non-standard GPS antennas and high-end 360-degree cameras after a drone was spotted over-flying a German naval vessel.

Around the same time, a second Russian freighter operating between the North Sea and the Baltic was identified as being a suspected launch pad for military-grade fixed-wing drones used to inspect dozens of sites using satellite navigation.

In the six months since last September, Europe has suffered a spate of suspected drone incidents, which led to the disruption of airports and military bases in Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium and Ireland.

Among the most high-profile episodes occurred last December when four military-class drones were seen near the flight path of a plane carrying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as it headed towards Dublin airport. The Irish authorities said it was suspected that the drones had been launched from a vessel in the Irish Sea using GPS spoofing techniques to hide its identity and location.

Separately, there is growing evidence that Moscow is deploying specialist personnel aboard shadow fleet vessels to conduct clandestine or intelligence operations.

In March, French prosecutors outlined the findings of an investigation into the Boracay, a Benin-flagged tanker seized off the Brittany coast last September after it was suspected of involvement in drone incidents targeting Denmark. Security sources said two Russian nationals, one of whom had previously worked for the notorious Wagner mercenary group, had been found on board the vessel, fuelling suspicions that Moscow is placing intelligence officers on board its tanker fleets.

One UK intelligence source said: “This is all about Russia wanting to increase the pain for Ukraine’s allies by weaponising the shadow fleet. The extra personnel [on board the tankers] are ostensibly security guards whose primary role is to watch over non-Russian crews.

“But it is well within Moscow’s intelligence capabilities to place specialists on board these ships to gather intelligence as they pass through European waters, including the [English] Channel.”

In the event of a conflict with Nato, experts believe the shadow fleet and other vessels such as fishing boats are being prepared by the Kremlin for “asymmetric combat deployment”.

Admiral James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of Nato, warned last October that Moscow is likely to be developing plans to use the shadow fleet to carry commandos in unmarked uniforms to assault civilian shipping, for the launch of disguised missiles, to conduct electronic jamming and to rip out vital navigation aids such as buoys and shipping channel lights.

A key issue with confronting the shadow fleet is the difficulty of conclusively tying vessels to individual incidents. Russian tankers often encrypt communications and routinely turn off their location beacons and tracking devices, making the building of a case against specific vessels challenging.

Data collated by maritime intelligence company Windward recorded a 153 per cent increase in “drifting activity” – vessels remaining stationary or moving without apparent purpose – in the Baltic during 2024. The tactic is often linked to damage to subsea cables and pipelines caused by vessels dragging their anchors.

And yet when Finnish authorities seized a Russian oil tanker, the Eagle S, for rupturing an electricity link which provides two-thirds of the transfer capacity between Estonia and Finland, the case was eventually thrown out by the courts on the basis that there was a lack of proven intent and jurisdiction.

Experts said countries were ill-prepared for facing the security threat posed by the shadow fleet and need to improve their tracking of vessels and achieve greater consistency in their response to sabotage or espionage incidents. Stupnicki said: “The shadow fleet is integral to Russia’s hybrid warfare strategy and war economy, and its threat to European waters is not likely to subside.”