COPENHAGEN: Large drones that flew over Copenhagen airport for hours and caused it to shut down constituted the “most serious attack on Danish critical infrastructure” to date, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday.
Airports in Copenhagen and Oslo reopened early Tuesday, hours after unidentified drones in their airspace caused dozens of flights to be diverted or canceled, disrupting travel for thousands of passengers.
“This is part of the development we have recently observed with other drone attacks, airspace violations, and cyberattacks targeting European airports,” Frederiksen said in a statement sent to AFP.
She referred to similar drone incidents in Poland and Romania and the violation by Russian fighter jets of Estonia’s airspace.
The governments of Poland, Estonia and Romania have pointed the finger at Moscow, which has brushed off the allegations.
Frederiksen told Danish broadcaster DR she could “not rule out” that Russia was behind the drone activity.
- NATO warns Russia -
Moscow denied involvement, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissing her remarks as “unfounded accusations.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced what he called a Russian violation of Denmark’s airspace, in a message on X.
Danish police meanwhile said they had been unable to identify the drone operator.
“The number, size, flight patterns, time over the airport. All this together ... indicates that it is a capable actor. Which capable actor, I do not know,” Copenhagen police inspector Jens Jespersen told reporters.
“It was an actor that had the capacity, the will and the tools to make their presence known,” he said.
NATO said it was “too early to say” whether Russia was responsible, but warned Moscow to stop an “escalatory” pattern of airspace violations along its eastern flank.
- ‘High threat of sabotage’ -
Danish intelligence said the Scandinavian country was facing a “high threat of sabotage.”
“Someone may not necessarily want to attack us, but rather stress us out and see how we react,” said Flemming Drejer, director of operations at Denmark’s intelligence service PET.
The drones incident came a week after Denmark announced it would acquire long-range precision weapons for the first time, citing the need to be able to hit distant targets as Russia would pose a threat “for years to come.”
Moscow’s ambassador to Copenhagen Vladimir Barbin had called the statement “pure madness.”
“No one, anywhere, ever in the world has considered threatening a nuclear power publicly. These statements will undoubtedly be taken into account,” he warned in a statement on Telegram.
Jespersen said “several large drones” flew over the Copenhagen airport for more than three hours on Monday evening.
Police decided not to shoot down the drones for safety reasons.
Jespersen told DR it was not known where the drones were being controlled from, but that it could have been from many kilometers away, possibly “from a ship.”
- Air traffic disruptions -
Airport officials said air traffic had resumed early Tuesday but 20,000 passengers were affected by flight diversions and cancelations.
Copenhagen police said they were cooperating with colleagues in Oslo after drone sightings also caused the airport in the Norwegian capital to close for several hours.
“We had two different drone sightings,” Oslo airport spokeswoman Monica Fasting told AFP, adding that 14 flights were diverted.
Norwegian police had yet to comment on the drone incident overnight, but the country’s intelligence service PST told AFP it was involved in the investigation.
Norway’s government on Tuesday said Russia had violated its airspace three times this year — in April, July and August — after a decade without any similar incidents.
“We cannot determine whether this was done intentionally or due to navigation errors. Regardless of the cause, this is not acceptable,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in a statement.
