Authorities in Norway also shut down Oslo Airport for three hours on Monday evening after a drone was seen.
Suspicions of Russian involvement in the Copenhagen Airport incident were unfounded, Russia’s ambassador to Denmark said on Tuesday.
Norwegian and Danish authorities were in close contact over the Copenhagen and Oslo incidents on Monday, but their investigation has not yet established a connection, Norway’s foreign minister said.
Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Wednesday that weapons being developed to fight the war in Ukraine, including drones, posed a severe threat to humanity.
“We are now living through the most destructive arms race in human history,” he told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
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Zelensky identified a dangerous future in which artificial intelligence-enabled drones could pose an even more terrifying threat, and said regulation of such technology was as urgent as curbs on nuclear weapons.
A string of drone sightings and digital outages has repeatedly disrupted airports since 2017. These episodes bypass core flight-safety systems and trigger disruptions to check-in and boarding systems, power infrastructure and airfield perimeters, causing ripple effects across networks.
Persistent drone reports crippled London’s Gatwick Airport for three days during the 2018 Christmas peak. The British Army was deployed with specialist drone-hunting equipment, but no drones were ever shot down or discovered, and police later even suggested they may have never existed.
‘More than one’
Danish police told reporters that “more than one drone” had been sighted near Aalborg Airport on Wednesday evening, and they were flying with lights on.
The drones were first sighted about 9.44pm (5.45am Thursday AEST) according to police, who could not specify the types of drones or whether they were the same as the ones flying over Copenhagen Airport on Monday.
Police said there was no danger to passengers at Aalborg Airport or nearby residents. Three flights were diverted to other airports, they said.
Southern Jutland police later said in a post on X that drones had also been observed near airports in the Danish towns of Esbjerg, Sonderborg and Skrydstrup. Fighter Wing Skrydstrup in Southern Jutland is the base for Denmark’s F-16 and F-35 fighter jets.
National police commissioner Thorkild Fogde said people across Denmark had reported drone sightings since Monday and, while “many of these reports do not cover activities that are of interest to the police or the military, some of them do, and I think the one in Aalborg does”, he said.
Police said they were investigating further and co-operating with the national intelligence service and the armed forces, as well as authorities in other countries. “It is too early to say what the goal of the drones is and who is the actor behind,” a police official said.
Airspace violations
The latest alerts come as European countries scramble to respond to a string of airspace violations by Russian drones and aircraft in recent days.
Poland’s air force shot down Russian drones that crossed into the country on September 9, a Russian drone flew over Romanian territory on September 13, and six days later, MiG-31 fighter planes were escorted out of Estonia after an incursion that lasted 12 minutes.
A Russian MiG-31. Three of the fighters breached Estonia’s airspace last week.Credit: AP
Russia has typically denied airspace violations and dismissed the drone overflights as accidental.
Some European officials see the incidents as a deliberate ploy by Russian President Vladimir Putin to test the collective resolve of NATO allies to defend one another from attack.
Russian military aircraft, such as helicopters and transport planes, have occasionally veered into the airspace of NATO member states over the years.
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Military experts view the incursions as a symbolic display of disregard for NATO borders, and, in the case of former Soviet states such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, a signal that Moscow doesn’t consider them to be independent nations.
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said NATO nations should shoot down Russian aircraft that enter their airspace. But whether Washington would lend its support would depend on the circumstances, he said. Meanwhile, the allies have been sending mixed messages about how they should deal with such incidents.
The Poland incursion involved about 20 Russian attack drones, and NATO took the unprecedented step of shooting some of them down. The breach of Estonian airspace was unusually overt, with multiple Russian aircraft flying to within minutes of the capital, Tallinn, and involving fighter jets rather than the ageing military transport planes more commonly observed in such incidents.
Reuters, Bloomberg
