This year marked the 85th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, which took place between July and October 1940. The German Luftwaffe called it the Kanalkampf. Initially, the daily skirmishes in the skies were assessed in terms of the aircraft and aircrew that took part and were lost or survived. The Bentley Priory Museum, wartime HQ of RAF Fighter Command, lists 2,937 aircrew, average age 20, of 16 nationalities, some from the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, who flew against the Luftwaffe. Of these, 966, fully one third, were killed or wounded. After 15 September 1940, Hitler shelved plans to invade England, switching his attention to the Soviet Union, and daylight raids were abandoned in favour of nighttime bombing – the Blitz. Victory was really delivered, though, by the ‘Dowding System’, named after the head of Fighter Command.

It was the vision and foresight of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding (1882-1970) that enabled success in 1940, as much as the bravery of his mostly volunteer reservist pilots. Having taken an interest in inter-war military technology when Air Council Member for Supply and Research between 1930-36, his system integrated walls of anti-aircraft batteries, fledgling Radio Direction Finding (RDF, later known as radar) towers, and posts of Royal Observer Corps volunteers who scanned the skies with binoculars, all of whom identified enemy aircraft threats. With their warnings plotted on giant map tables, inflated barrage balloons on cables rose to protect potential targets, while fighter squadrons were directed by telephone and radio to intercept the raiders. With his finger continually on the pulse of battle, Dowding’s untested system was designed to provide minute-by-minute knowledge of his opponents and allow him to husband and move his own forces accordingly.

With his lair at Bentley Priory, a converted country house at Stanmore, in the northwest outskirts of London, Dowding’s system was repeated at lower levels in every Group and Sector operations room. That of No. 11 Group was at Uxbridge, with its sector headquarters at Biggin Hill, Debden, Hornchurch, Kenley, Northolt, North Weald, and Tangmere aerodromes. Some rooms were hit, but the network was extremely resilient, and with control centres duplicated at every level, it was never overwhelmed.

Dowding’s innovation was the forerunner of every computer-driven interconnected headquarters today, whether overseeing fire and rescue assets, from ambulances, crash tenders and lifeboats, air and sea traffic control, the workings of international freight companies, countrywide railway services or power generation and storage for the national grid. While the Germans, too, possessed radar, often with more advanced sets than those of the RAF, they were less well integrated into military networks, because Hitler and his acolytes looked on the technology as defensive, whereas their interests were in offensive hardware. Neither side could have anticipated how central radar would become to the successful prosecution of war on land, sea and in the air throughout the Second World War, and in every conflict since.

With interests in numerous air-related inventions, Dowding also brought the eight-gun Spitfire and Hurricane monoplanes into service when head of Fighter Command during 1936-40, and fought hard to do so. When told that bullet-proof windscreens were too expensive to be fitted to his fighters, he retorted: ‘If Chicago gangsters can have bulletproof glass in their cars, I cannot see why my pilots should not have the same.’ From May 1940, many pilots’ lives were saved by his insistence on armour plate protecting the rear of their cockpits.

Another key factor in the Battle of Britain was the range of personnel, from members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, six of whom won Military Medals for gallantry and one a George Cross, to volunteer pilots from across the free world. Churchill’s radio broadcast of 15 September 1940 noted that: ‘Aided by Czech and Polish squadrons, and using only a small proportion of their total strength, the Royal Air Force has cut to rags and tatters separate waves of murderous assault upon the civil population of our native land.’ Dowding later echoed this multinationalism: ‘had it not been for the magnificent work of the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry, I hesitate to say that the outcome of battle would have been the same.’

Today a new aerial war is being fought over Europe. It, too, is reliant on cutting edge technology, whose full potential has yet to be realised. The undeclared war is most obviously witnessed in daily attacks by drones striking far into Russia and Ukraine. Some devices are unarmed decoys to deflect attention. Others, such as those of Kyiv’s 14th Regiment of Unmanned Aviation, carry an increasingly heavy payload to disable railway lines, industrial plants, pipelines, power networks and oil refineries. The same concepts have spread to sea, with remotely-guided, unmanned speed boats deployed against Russian shipping, harbours and bridges. Ukraine’s choice of targets echo those bombed by the Allied strategic bombing forces in 1944.

Implementation of Eisenhower’s Transportation Plan of April-June 1944 against bridges, rail centres, including marshalling yards and repair shops in France severely limited the Wehrmacht’s land response to D-Day. The allied Oil Plan was first launched at hideous cost against Romania’s Ploiești oilfields in 1943, continued by the Eighth, Ninth and 15th US Air Forces and RAF Bomber Command until late 1944, and encompassed assaults on all Axis refineries, synthetic-fuel factories, storage depots and other petroleum-linked infrastructure. By 1945, it had caused the German war machine to grind to a halt.

Both these allied aerial plans have been resuscitated by Kyiv, while Moscow’s ground and air defences appear to be struggling to keep up. International news media are reporting that 22 of the Russian Federation’s 38 large refineries, where crude oil is converted into petrol and diesel, were hit in August and September, with multiple sorties against most of them. Some attacks saw drones, supported by SBU special forces sabotage units, penetrate deep inside Russia.

Early in October, witnesses saw flames leap from the Kirishnefteorgsintez oil refinery outside St Petersburg, while the previous month the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat refinery in Bashkortostan, more than 700 miles from Ukraine’s frontier, was hit twice. The large Ryazan oil plant near Moscow, capable of producing 340,000 barrels per day, has been struck five times since January. The Korobkovsky gas processing plant outside Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), the largest plant for processing natural gas and associated petroleum gas in southern Russia, and the nearby Yefimovka production dispatch facility, were enveloped by explosions on 8 October, while two of three petroleum plants in distant Samara as well as eight others have been forced to suspend operations altogether.

As a result of these unmanned attacks, on certain days Russian national gasoline output may have declined by as much as a fifth, causing huge tailbacks at filling stations. Fuel rationing has been introduced in occupied Crimea, while most small and independent petrol stations in Siberia, St Petersburg and Moscow have shut due to ongoing supply issues. Fuel, already 40 per cent higher per litre since January, has become virtually unobtainable for non-government vehicles. The rigidly censored domestic media can only hint that drone strikes are to blame, with the newspaper Kommersant attributing the shortfall to ‘unscheduled refinery shutdowns’, acknowledging there was ‘a partial ban on petrol exports, which has been extended to the end of 2025’.

Western experts assess that Zelensky’s oil campaign alone will not bring Russia to its knees, but is certainly increasing Putin’s pain and the inconvenience to his people. Were the impact of the strikes strengthened by further measures, including stronger sanctions against western imports of Russian oil and gas products, including those via third-party countries, and the impounding of Moscow’s fleet of around 1,000 ‘shadow tankers’, registered to obscure bodies, and by which the Russians evade oil sanctions, then the Kremlin’s ability to continue their war against Ukraine would be undermined.

As it is, Russia’s oil exports to China, India and Turkey, in the form of unrefined crude oil, of which the Kremlin is allowed by OPEC to produce 9.415 million barrels per day, are at a record high. However, the state pipeline firm Transneft, which handles more than 80 per cent of all the crude oil pumped in Russia, has warned producers to accept lower volumes, due to Ukrainian drone strikes.

Russia’s fundamental problem is that China, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, in a bid to create energy resilience, has been hoarding around one million barrels a day since January this year, and is building 11 extra storage sites to increase its stocks. Additionally, there are currently around 1.2 billion barrels of crude oil at sea (OAS), much of it in Russia’s shadow tanker fleet. The amount of OAS, the highest since 2016, suggests that current world demand is falling short of supply: there is too much of the black stuff around that is not being consumed. Much OAS is sailing from place to place looking for a buyer, rather than being transported from seller to buyer after a trade has been made. Ultimately, international demand for Russian oil is falling away and nothing the Kremlin can do will correct this trend in the short term.

Russia’s budget for 2026, unveiled on 7 October, revealed that projected oil and gas revenues for 2025 stand at 22 per cent lower than those for 2024. Its sluggish economy is expected to grow by just one per cent. Defence, propaganda and investment in the occupied regions remain protected, with military and security spending alone projected at 38 per cent of the state budget for 2026. Media and propaganda will receive 6.6 per cent more than last year with the sinister Institute for Internet Development, one of the Kremlin’s main vehicles for producing international youth-oriented disinformation and propaganda, receiving a significant tranche.

However, most Russians acknowledge that their economy is in a mess, with inflation averaging a stubbornly high eight per cent (although down from its February-May high of ten per cent), largely because of war-related spending and state subsidies, and its Central Bank interest rate, currently at 17 per cent. After years of heavy drawdowns, the liquid portion of the Russian Wealth Fund – held in foreign currency and gold – has fallen by roughly half since the invasion of Ukraine, which Putin is trying but failing to reconstitute.

Putin has directed the state Duma to make up some of the financial shortfall by increasing business taxes and the rate of income tax for the wealthiest to 60 per cent. However, in Russia’s Kafkaesque state, some of this money will merely flow back into the pockets of Putin’s Duma cronies who voted for the increase. A stark reminder of what then happens arrived this week when Spain forcibly seized five luxury villas owned by Nikolai Kolesov, CEO of Russian Helicopters. This followed an investigation by the late Alexei Navalny’s team of investigators into the siphoning of Russian defence assets into shell companies and their subsequent purchase of two jets, a helicopter, and overseas property in Mallorca registered in the names of Kolesov’s sister and two children, aged seven and four. While the role of individuals in money laundering may be contested, it remains a fact that Russian oligarchs as a group are the top property investors across Europe.

Putin continues to punish Kyiv, most recently with strikes on Ukraine’s electricity and gas energy plants, ahead of winter. Among the targets of the 450 Russian drones and 30 missiles launched overnight on 9-10 October were also water pumping stations, underlining his callous targeting of civilians, whereas Ukraine’s efforts have always been directed against the Russian state’s war-making assets. With his failing economy, Putin has been attempting to enmesh his CRINK (the new acronym for the West’s opponents of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) allies into his war, in terms of personnel, technology or equipment. Smaller national contingents from Serbia, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Somalia, India and, as revealed in US State Department analysis on 5 October, up to 5,000 Cuban fighters, have also been reported as being in Ukraine under Russian command.

Moscow is also determined to retaliate against those it sees as sustaining Ukraine, notably the western nations of NATO and the EU. Putin’s power rests on convincing his own domestic audience that they are fighting for their very survival, as they had to against Napoleon and Hitler. The Kremlin depends on permanent escalation, giving the constant impression that Russia is surrounded and besieged, and capable of defence only if united under Putin’s leadership. This rhetoric of existential threat is the foundation of his authority, as it was for Stalin. Yet for such figures, stability can only expose the emptiness of their promises. Thus, if Moscow is not escalating, it is fragile; if Russia is not conquering, it is losing. The survival of the regime requires external conflict, as much as oxygen is necessary for breathing. This is why any pause in Putin’s aggression is only ever temporary, and why peace, for such a ruler, is not an option but a threat.

One new way the Russian regime has found to escalate is via drone incursions, with many mysterious overflights of EU members reported in recent weeks. On 10 September, a swarm of 23 Russian drones flew into Polish airspace. Although Belarus and even President Trump claimed this might have been a mistake, the fact that they lingered for seven hours and 15 minutes suggests otherwise. NATO’s reaction was resolute. Dutch F-35s, Polish F-16s, an Italian airborne AWACS plane, supported by a Belgian A330 aerial tanker, shepherded them, and shot down four. German MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air systems based in Poland were also placed on high alert. This was the first direct encounter between NATO and Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Days later, NATO jets escorted three Russian warplanes out of Estonian airspace. Since then, drone intrusions have occurred near airports, military installations and critical infrastructure, across the continent and prompted European defence ministers to revise their intercept procedures and consider a protective drone wall along their borders. They have concluded that if Russia tests NATO, the response must be immediate, united, and overwhelming.

Munich Airport was closed twice in 24 hours during 2-3 October after drone sightings, which affected numerous international flights. This was a repetition of incidents on 22 September, when drones flew around Copenhagen airport, causing major chaos to air traffic. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen considered this ‘the most serious attack on Danish critical infrastructure to date’. The Copenhagen culprit was soon identified as the 4,000-ton Russian Ropucha-class landing ship Aleksandr Shabalin, loitering nearby with its maritime transponder switched off. She had been in the area for several days, precisely coinciding with the period of intense drone activity over Danish airports and military sites.

Shabalin was also escorting another drone platform, the 800-foot Russian ‘shadow tanker’ Boracay, which French special forces subsequently boarded in the Bay of Biscay on 1 October. Also known as Pushpa and Kiwala, she is allegedly a Benin-flagged vessel but sanctioned by UK and EU maritime authorities. Already briefly detained by Estonian coast guards for sailing without a valid country flag, and carrying a suspiciously Russian crew all bearing military haircuts, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov nevertheless denied any knowledge of the vessel. At President Macron’s direction, French prosecutors in Brest have opened an investigation on two counts: refusing an order to stop, and failing to justify the nationality of the ship’s flag.

The same evening other drones overflew Oslo Airport, causing fresh disruption. Unmanned devices from the Shabalin or Boracay also overflew Danish military aerodromes, including the largest at Karup, on 24-25 September. In Kiel, Germany, multiple drones were spotted on 25 September over a power plant, the Heide oil refinery, and nosing around TKMS, a maritime defence technology provider. Others still were spotted over Sanitz military base, near Rostock.

In its insecurity, Russia denies any wrong-doing, which is precisely why it chose this new tactic, for it brings plausible deniability. These drone flights were not mistakes or local youths testing the boundaries of local laws, but studied assessments of NATO unity and resolve. Russia traditionally respects strength, expressed by visible readiness and action. It feels most comfortable when its actions are cloaked in ambiguity, operating in the ‘grey zone’ of espionage, disinformation and hybrid sabotage. Just as for Dowding’s Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, NATO’s strength is in its multinational unity of purpose, and the commitment of its young men and women. In 1940, Luftwaffe aircrew warned each other, ‘Achtung! Spitfire!’ Today the phrase over Germany is ‘Achtung! Drohne!’