The Gerbera drone has a wingspan of 2.5 meters, a range of 600 kilometers, and can reach European coastline from a Mediterranean cargo vessel in under two hours. According to a report from Spanish newspaper El Mundo, citing Lithuanian intelligence sources, the CIA believes Russia is already launching them.
The CIA director made a secret trip to Moscow on August 25. What he brought back was apparently alarming enough to share with every NATO ally in the region.
The intelligence report paints a picture that should make every European defense minister lose sleep. Russian vessels operating in the Mediterranean — ostensibly civilian — are suspected of serving as mobile drone platforms capable of reaching Spain, France, and Italy. The 600-kilometer range and 1-2 hour flight time from ship to shore aren't projections. They're specifications.
French President Emmanuel Macron convened his Defense Council on September 16. Two days later, on September 18, France began positioning Mistral ground-to-air missiles and electronic warfare countermeasures around strategic assets, including the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. By September 19, the Russian military-linked Telegram channel Rybar had published a map of the French defensive positions.
So France set up its air defenses, and within 72 hours Moscow's propaganda channels were publishing the GPS coordinates. That's not intelligence collection. That's a message.
This isn't the first time Russian drones have treated European airspace like an open highway. Poland reported 19 unarmed Russian drones violating its airspace in the year prior. A Russian drone, stalking a Ukrainian cargo plane, collided with an aircraft at a German airport. Sweden's navy has been tracking a Russian intelligence ship lurking in the Öresund Strait.
Austria, for its part, responded to the escalating threat by running a military exercise with 300 soldiers and a 35-millimeter cannon. Three hundred soldiers. To counter a drone program allegedly operating from international waters across the entire Mediterranean basin.
The pattern here isn't complicated. Russia has spent years probing European defenses — airspace violations, undersea cable mapping, intelligence ships parked in strategic straits — and Europe has spent those same years cutting defense budgets and scheduling summits about cutting defense budgets. The CIA didn't deliver this warning because the threat is new. They delivered it because the threat finally became too obvious for Europe to keep pretending it wasn't there.
Macron convened a council. Austria held a drill. NATO issued no public statement. Meanwhile, Rybar published the French missile positions before the launchers were cold.
The 600-kilometer range means a single ship positioned off the coast of Algeria can reach southern France, eastern Spain, and most of Italy. The estimated flight time is one to two hours.