A camera with rotors

A small drone in 2026 is a camera on four rotors, bought in a shop, weighing anything from under 250 grams to under 25 kilograms in the EU’s class marks. The same airframe flies for a hobbyist, a farmer and a film crew. In Ukraine the same rotors and radio, on a frame with a battery, a camera and a warhead, went to the army three million times in 2025, by the defence ministry’s count.

A drone in the air holds four links at once. Its pilot’s commands come up a control link. The pictures it takes, with telemetry beside them, go down a video link. Its position comes in from satellites. In the EU, since 2024, on drones with a class mark, its identity goes out on a Remote ID broadcast that anyone with a phone can receive.

All four links are radio, and radio does not know who is listening. A first-person-view drone is flown through goggles that show its camera live, so the pilot sees what it sees. The Ukrainian war’s version, a hand-built racing quadcopter with a warhead, sends that picture to the goggles on an analogue link, and a receiver tuned to the channel can see it as it is. A consumer Mavic sends a digital one that such a receiver cannot show. Some drones now fly on a fibre-optic thread and send nothing over the air.

link                from           to                anyone with an antenna can
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
control link        controller  ─▶ drone             hear it, jam it, join it
video link          drone       ─▶ controller        watch it, jam it
satellite position  satellites  ─▶ drone             forge it
Remote ID           drone       ─▶ anyone in range   read it, write false ones

By design, lose the control link and the drone does what its maker chose, landing or turning for home. The EU class rules require that choice to be “reliable and predictable”. Lose the satellites and it drifts. Lose the video and it flies blind. Switch off the broadcast and it flies illegally.

The rules in Europe

The EU sorts drone flights into three categories. The open category covers leisure and low-risk work: under 25 kilograms, below 120 metres, no authorisation needed. The specific category is everything outside those limits, on authorisation, and the certified category is for even higher risks. A class mark printed on the aircraft, C0 to C4, sets where it may fly: C0 under 250 grams, C1 under 900 grams, C2 under 4 kilograms, C3 and C4 under 25.

The operator registers with the national authority for any drone over 250 grams, and for a lighter one if it has a camera and is not a toy. The registration number goes into the Remote ID broadcast, mandatory since 1 January 2024. The public can receive the broadcast. Only an enforcement authority can turn the number into a name. Intended, that is.

The war

Russia’s drone production expanded again in 2025. Open sources do not give a reliable total for all drone types built that year, but production sites continued to turn out thousands of long-range attack drones, while the Geran series was repeatedly modified and moved from experiment into production. In August 2026 Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence put Geran-2 production at about 2,800 a month, and output of the jet-powered Geran-4 and Geran-5, on a Chinese turbojet at up to 500 km/h, at about 3,000 a month.

Ukraine produced about 2.2 million unmanned aircraft of all types in 2024, according to the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw, and its army took delivery of three million FPV drones in 2025, by the defence ministry’s count.

A single brigade used several hundred a month. Up to three quarters of all drones flown by both sides in 2024 were stopped by jamming, and in 2025 the Centre put the share of FPV strikes that failed to destroy their target at 60 to 80 per cent. In March 2026 the defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced that the volume of drones going to the front had doubled against the same months of 2025, and by April the army had received twice as many interceptor drones in four months as in all of 2025.

Those numbers set the scale. Drones are cheap enough to lose, and a jammer can be cheap enough to build for a hackathon prize. The European counter-drone market is beginning to reflect the same economics.

Counter-drone

Counter-drone is a chain:

  • Radar, a radio receiver, a microphone, a camera senses the drone.

  • Software, or a person at a screen, decides whether it is a drone and whose it is.

  • A jammer, a spoofer, an interceptor acts on it.

The Czech write-up on a student detection mesh lays the chain out as sensors, command and control, effectors, and the logistics, training and certification around them. It puts a 1.9 billion koruna Czech passive tracking system and a university prototype in the same first layer, the sensors.

A small drone flying low is hard for radar: a tiny reflection, moving slowly, merging with trees and buildings. So the cheap layer is a receiver or a microphone. Radio detection has its own limit: more drones talk over LTE, where they sound like phones, or fly on fibre and say nothing.

Europe in 2026

In the three months before February 2026, drones disrupted airports and military sites at Berlin, Munich, Brussels, Liege, Antwerp, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Oslo and Dublin. Vienna’s main utility recorded more than 1,300 illegal overflights in three months, and Spanish police intercepted smugglers’ drones carrying 200 kg of drugs in 2025.

All three come from Commissioner Brunner’s speech in Strasbourg. The Commission’s answer is an action plan that would turn 5G antennae into sensors, put what every sensor sees into one airspace picture, and keep a camera drone on the ground until its operator is identified.

Three of the four links can be received by somebody other than their two ends, and the fourth can be forged. The Commission proposes a grid of receivers the size of a country. The drone is the smallest thing in the picture.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.