January 14, 2026: Last year in Europe there were over a thousand incidents of drones flying near or over military installations. Over 2,000 drones were involved, and, in 96 percent of the incidents, the drone operators could not be identified. German intelligence experts concluded that whoever was doing this had financial and logistical resources to carry out these extensive drone operations. The primary suspect was Russia, which had already been caught carrying out sabotage and disruption operations in the Baltic Sea, Germany and the Netherlands.

In May of last year, two cargo ships, the HAV Dolphin and the HAV Snapper, were seen behaving strangely. The Dolphin was moving aimlessly around Kiel Bay for ten days. The ship never unloaded or took on cargo. Meanwhile, over a hundred kilometers away, off the Netherlands coast, the Snapper remained stationary near a Dutch island two hours before seven drones were seen hovering over the Russian freighter Lauga being escorted by the German police to the North Sea. The Snapper stayed behind for four days, moving aimlessly in circles.

The activities of Dolphin and Snapper were reported briefly and not with much detail, in European media. Seven German journalism students noted these stories and decided to practice what they were studying and find out what was really going on. It took the students five week and a 2,500 kilometer automobile ride across three countries to find out what Russian drones were doing over Europe and how they were getting there.

The students obtained relevant classified documents describing the extent of the drone problem. While the documents were classified, most of the data had already appeared in European media. The mystery drones had been seen over military installations and in several instances that included drone activity shutting down commercial airports for hours or intermittently over a period of days.

The public uproar over these disruptions led German police and security agencies to go after the usual suspects. These included the two Russian freighters Dolphin and Snapper. Both ships were searched several times and nothing was found. The German student investigators discovered that the searches were perfunctory and superficial. Left unsearched were shipping containers that would have contained drones and equipment to launch and operate them.

Drones had been spotted over or near defense manufacturing facilities, chemical producers and nuclear power plants. The drones were also showing over areas where shipments of military equipment for Ukraine were being prepared. Any facility involved with supporting Ukrainian military operations noticed more drones buzzing around.

When concerned citizens or local officials made inquiries, the government always seemed to give the same answer, that there was nothing sinister going on and that these investigations were ongoing. None of this was true, because no government agency was putting all the clues together and discovering what the seven students later revealed. And the revelation was that the drones were Russian, not local hobbyists or civilians using their own drones. Most of the suspicious drone activity took place near the North Sea or Baltic Sea coast. The Russians were using three cargo ships, Lauga, Dolphin and Snapper as launch platforms for drones. Most commercial ships currently carry drones to assist in operations. But the Russian ships were carrying hundreds of drones as well as drone operators and technicians to conduct reconnaissance, surveillance and occasional harassment missions.

The seven German journalism students sorted through all this data and concluded, in a well-documented assessment, that the Russians were using the same three cargo ships to carry out espionage activities. These ships were working for the Russian Defense Ministry, and it took seven diligent German students to document and prove it.

The students used publicly available AIS/Automated Identification System ship tracking systems to find where Lauga, Dolphin and Snapper were and had been. Currently you can still track these ships via the AIS. Western intelligence agencies rely on AIS tracking for all sorts of things. AIS was originally developed to make it easier to track ships at sea and was rapidly adopted by most large commercial vessels in the 1990s. AIS is essentially an automatic radio transponder beacon that, when it receives a signal from a nearby AIS equipped ship, responds with the ship's identity, course, and speed. This is meant to enable AIS ships to avoid collisions with each other. Smugglers or merchant ships dealing in shady practices turn off their AIS.