The warnings arrived in a torrent. One airline, then another. One airport, then the next. By the time Thursday was over, at least 21 flights and several airports across Europe had been hit by bomb threats.
In almost every case — London’s Heathrow being the conspicuous exception — the threat was judged credible enough to divert the aircraft, or, in Italy, to scramble fighter jets to escort it out of the sky.
Every single one turned out to be false.
Which does not, of course, mean the next one will be.
The Pattern That Points East
It is the coordination that unsettles people. These were not random, isolated scares. They arrived together, across multiple countries, in a way that looks engineered rather than opportunistic.
And that has pushed suspicion in one direction: Moscow.
The circumstantial case is not thin. Earlier this year came a wave of cyber-attacks and mysterious drone sightings over sensitive sites. In the past few days alone, there has been the remote hacking of supermarket freezers and a blood bank, a suspicious incident on Poland’s border with Russia, and — in August — a drone attack on Germany’s Leipzig Halle airport that the country’s interior minister publicly blamed on Moscow.
Against that backdrop, many argue, this must be yet another example of hybrid warfare — the grey-zone, sub-threshold kind, designed to damage a nation’s infrastructure or fray its society while remaining anonymous, deniable and just short of triggering Nato’s Article 5.
The Kremlin’s Grievance
The motive, if this is the work of Moscow, is not hard to find.
Russia is furious with Nato for backing Ukraine and, in doing so, frustrating the Kremlin’s ambitions to swallow the country and end its independence.
And there is a strand of Russian commentary that makes the logic explicit: if Ukrainian drones are making Russian airports unsafe, and Western sanctions are keeping Russian airlines out of European airspace, then why shouldn’t Western nations feel the same pain?
But Where Is the Proof?
Here is where the story gets harder.
As of Thursday evening, no hard evidence had emerged linking the airline hoaxes to Russia, Iran or any proxy group controlled by them.
There was, however, an email sent on Thursday morning to airport authorities in Rome, purporting to come from “Fighters of the Male State” — a name that likely refers to Muzhskoi Legion, or “Male Legion”, an ultra-right Russian group so extreme that a Moscow court banned it in 2021.
Yet the group retained tens of thousands of online followers on Telegram as it cheered on the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following year.
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Even if the email is genuine — and there is no way to be sure another group is not hiding behind the name — it is unlikely to give investigators the leads they need to establish who is generating these hoaxes and why.
The Cold, Hard Leads
For national police forces, airport authorities and transport ministries, the temptation is to chase the most likely culprit.
The professional obligation is the opposite: to follow the cold, hard leads, wherever they point — if they can be found at all.
That is the uncomfortable place Europe now finds itself. The skies have reopened. The question of who closed them has not been answered.