How corprations and governments give their lobbying and influence an aura of respectability by using think tanks as a front and how this is supported by corporate and state media Ewald Engelen is Professor of Financial Geography at the University of Amsterdam Photo: NATO A week before the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara, on July 7 and 8, a London military think tank is publishing a report in which all European drone sightings from the past two years are neatly swept together, serving as evidence of a systematic attempt by the Russian side to map the gaps in European air defense.
“Russia’s UAV campaign over Europe,” is the title of the report , and in that line, there are two words that have to do the heavy lifting. First, that it is a “campaign,” and therefore about organizations and individuals with malicious intentions; and second, that those organizations and individuals are linked to the Russian state. In other words, it is Russia that has penetrated European airspace dozens of times with drones, thereby sowing panic among European citizens and authorities.
The purpose of the report is to point out to European authorities on the eve of the NATO summit that they really must do more work to make European airspace drone-proof. We are obviously talking about even more money for setting up anti-drone installations. Therefore, count on the announcement, later in Ankara, that even more money will go to the European Drone Defence Initiative , or, in the thief-jargon of the Brussels bureaucracy, the EDDI.
As indeed is the case. A happy secretary-general of NATO announced on July 7 in Ankara during a press conference that the EU members of NATO had decided to reserve an extra € 40 billion to be spent on anti-drone technology, a decision for which the IISS report provided the obvious legitimation if citizens and reporters would ask awkward questions. Which, of course, they didn’t.
That such a London think tank, called IISS, or in full : International Institute for Strategic Studies , publishes such a report a week before the NATO summit, in which a set of long-refuted drone observations of the past two years is dished up again, is no surprise. That is what such think tanks are paid for: to give reheated, hyped-up nonsense a veneer of respectability with graphs, tables, maps, figures, and the academic titles of the authors, in order to influence political and public opinion.
“Facts, analysis, influence”, reads the website of the IISS in large letters, even though the order when composing the reports is exactly the opposite: the desired “influence” determines the “analysis” and the “facts” gathered for it. Not from “facts” to “analysis” to “conclusion”, but from “conclusion” to “analysis” to “facts”. This is how every think tank operates, whether it concerns Clingendael, HCSS in the Hague or, in this case, IISS in London. And the direction in which they influence is obviously largely dictated by the agendas of the financiers and clients of these types of think tanks: the Dutch ministries of defense and foreign affairs and NATO in the case of Clingendael and HCSS.
And in the case of IISS these are Airbus, Babcock International , BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir Technologies, Rolls Royce, Boeing, Raython Technologies, and Saab. And, the royals of Bahrain, which in in the 2010’s have been secretly bankrolling IISS to the tune of at least 33 million UK pound , and counting, in a giant money for influence swap, causing the independent thinktank watchdog Transparify in 2017 to create a separate category of “deceptive” to categorize IISS.
All of the above have contributed more than a hundred thousand British pounds each, and they are all among the largest arms manufacturers in the world. And naturally, these financiers have no interest in sobriety, putting things into perspective, or downplaying a potential Russian threat, but only in escalation, hysteria, and fear. When there is sobriety, the order flow dries up; when there is fear, the defense billions flow. And that is exactly what these types of think tanks provide: fear, wrapped in the bespoke suit of a policy report.
No, what is surprising is that such a report receives so much resonance in the press and media. Uncritically, the shadowy facts, the shaky analyses, and the hence groundlessly robust conclusions and recommendations of the report have ended up in almost all major European newspapers, from AD to Volkskrant in the Netherlands, from Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Germany and Guardian to Financial Times in the UK.
Take the report in the Financial Times , surely one of the best-informed European newspapers with highly qualified reporters and commentators and an ironclad reputation among European decision-makers and policymakers.
The headline — “Russian drone campaign mapped Nato air defence gaps, study finds” — is sober and pertinent: this is indeed what the IISS report does. The same applies to the opening of the piece, in which claims about Russian drones are explicitly attributed to the think tank and the report.
“Russia successfully “mapped Nato’s air defence gaps” in a drone campaign that lasted almost two years and probably used shadow-fleet tankers to launch some of the devices, according to a new think-tank report. The 19-month-long effort, carried out in more than a dozen countries in the military alliance plus Ireland, “proceeded without a collective allied response”, according to the study by the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.”
Things go wrong in all those paragraphs where the newspaper summarizes, without quoting or referencing. Like here:
“It [the Russian campaign] exploited weaknesses not just in Europe’s air defence systems, but also legal frameworks and rules of engagement, while exposing serious shortcomings in the continent’s ability to respond to low-cost drones.”
And here:
“Some incursions were easy to attribute to Russia, such as 24 drones that invaded Polish airspace in September 2025, some of which were shot down by Nato .”
By recording such statements without attribution to a think tank and report, they acquire the appearance of factuality and objectivity with which the genre of reporting traditionally adorns itself.
This is reinforced by the inclusion of a graph in the piece, copied directly from the report, which shows the numbers of drone observations per month between August 2024 and February 2026 and bears the title: “Russia made 144 drone sorties into European airspace over 19 months”.
Every attribution to the report and think tank has disappeared: the drone observations are given a number and thus become quantifiable and therefore hard facts, and they are attributed to Russia in the same breath without any qualification (“possibly”, “probably”, “according to the think tank”, “according to experts”). Any possible doubt — were they actually drones, were they actually Russians, how do we know that, how reliable are the observations — is effectively airbrushed out here: things were counted, a graph was made of them, with an y-axis and an x-axis, and so it is a fact — and it is true.
Subsequently, the newspaper refers without any qualification, nuance, or question mark to drone sightings in the autumn of 2025 in the Netherlands (Volkel), Belgium (Zaventem), Denmark (Copenhagen), Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The newspaper presents these cases with the sentence: “Many of the incidents are well known”, thereby suggesting that there is consensus among serious authorities that these were indeed drone sightings, and that these were indeed Russian drones.
Anyone who has followed the reporting on the drones knows that these reports actually all had the same structure: a lot of media attention for the alleged drone sightings and the authorities’ reactions to them, followed by months of investigation, resulting in the conclusion that the sightings did not concern drones, or if they were drones, they were amateur drones, which is then given much less or no publicity. That is how it went in Denmark , in Belgium, in the Netherlands — actually throughout all of Europe. Newspaper Trouw, in collaboration with dronewatch.eu , investigated 61 drone observations . In only three cases could it be unequivocally concluded that they were Russian drones, and those involved observations in countries bordering Russia itself and could therefore be attributed to electronically jammed flight paths. In all other cases, they were not drones, but police helicopters, airplanes, or other regular flying objects and amateur drones.
The sentence in the Financial Times should therefore have read: “Many of the incidents were fake, were no incidents after all.”
Instead, the newspaper acts as if this previous research never took place, as if the data and causality are evident, and thereby gives the think tank and report the hallmark of objectivity and truth. A renowned think tank from London writes it, the Financial Times considers it newsworthy and writes about it, and so a piece of dodgy research acquires an aura of respectability that it absolutely does not deserve: this is mendacious propaganda and clearly serves the militarization agenda of the European military-industrial complex.
What is new is that the IISS has linked data from drone observations to data on Russian ship movements. Aside from the refutation mentioned above that in the vast majority of cases these were not drone observations at all, that had been the weak point in the Russian drone story from the very beginning. How could Russia launch drones over locations thousands of kilometers away from Russian territory: the operational range of this type of patrol drone was simply not that large. The brilliant but speculative answer from the IISS researchers to that was: let’s see if there were any Russian cargo ships nearby around the times of the drone observations. In other words, we are going to overlay two different types of geospatial datasets and see if we have a match.
And sure enough, “in many cases, Russian commercial vessels, including shadow-fleet tankers, were in the vicinity of the drone incursion,” according to the Financial Times .
To continue: “The report suggests these provided launch platforms, recovery locations or communication relay functions.”
And indeed, that is exactly what the report does: it raises the suggestion that the solution to the problem of causal explanations might lie in the presence of Russian cargo ships in international waters around the European continent. Nothing less, but also nothing more. At most, it could have resulted in a call for further research, not in firm conclusions about Russian intentions and the call to invest much more public money in drone prevention and to expand the legal possibilities for ship inspections.
What every master’s student knows, namely that correlation is not causation, is hastily swept under the rug in the report itself as well as in the news reports about it: it were indeed Russian drones, launched from Russian cargo ships. And the guilty conscience reveals itself in the obfuscated language in which both the report and the reports about it abound: “likely”, “it suggests that…”, “the pattern points to…”.
Even though there is no hard evidence and that should have been explicitly stated: the only interception of a Russian ship was a French one and the results of that have not yet been made public, read: the results are likely negative. And even though the correlation between drone and ship becomes very thin when you know that the Russian cargo fleet consists of more than three thousand ships consists and the 9 th th largest in the world, which means that at any time of the day, a Russian cargo ship can probably be spotted somewhere along the entire West European coast. You would likely have obtained the same results if you had done this with Chinese shipping data, the second largest cargo fleet in the world.
The conclusions about Russian intentions drawn by IISS are unwarrantedly robust, and the recommendations of IISS are again unwarrantedly strong: more money for drone defense and more legal powers to inspect Russian ships in international waters. While the facts are non-existent, the analysis rests on quicksand, and the conclusions and recommendations are therefore incongruous.
And that is not rocket science. Anyone with a bit of common sense and a small amount of research skills can search for and find this counter-information with a click of the mouse. Is it not a bit too coincidental that such a think tank, heavily funded by the arms industry, is breathing new life into the now-discarded drone story just before the NATO summit? Is a bit more skepticism and suspicion on the part of the press and media not appropriate? Should the reporting on it not have at least referred to the financial interests and the refutations of the earlier drone sightings?
Shouldn’t you as a reporter have sought out independent counter-expertise, experts who are not employed by the military-industrial complex? And if you fail to do that as a journalist, if you apparently find maintaining a frame of Russian threat more important than the facts, what does that say about your professional conception of your task? Are you still a reporter and a news medium, or are you actually a marketer and an advertising platform? And how do you justify that professionally, to your readers, your colleagues, the profession as a whole, and society?
Newspapers are considered a basic democratic necessity and owe their public status and subsidy to that. That creates obligations and responsibilities that established newspapers throughout Europe are currently trampling upon. This is not only harmful to those media outlets themselves, but also undermines the all-important democratic trust of citizens in the news gathering and reporting of those same media.
Whoever constantly talks about fighting disinformation should refrain from spreading it themselves, no matter how much it has adorned itself with the paraphernalia of seriousness and respectability. In fact, that is exactly when citizens expect the established press to be a truth-teller and to contradict the claims of authorities and their whisperers. With citizens against authorities instead of with authorities against citizens — that is what newspapers should be doing.
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The post Ewald Engelen – How critical thinking stops when a London-based thinktank talks – about the wondrous resurrection of the European dronescare appeared first on Brave New Europe .