Italy’s defence minister took to social media this week to dismiss a warning almost nobody in Rome had confirmed. Guido Crosetto posted a message urging the public not to “add fuel to the fire.” He rejected a Spanish newspaper’s account of a Russian plot to launch drone(s) at southern Europe from disguised ships.
The paper, El Mundo, traced the claim to a detailed dossier delivered to several European foreign ministries after the director of the CIA travelled to Moscow in August. It named Gerbera drones able to travel 600 kilometres from vessels flying under ordinary cargo cover.
Emmanuel Macron soon insisted the agency had told his government no such thing. Crosetto and Macron offered no evidence for their denials, while Washington gave no statement confirming or disowning the warning either.
A Warning Nobody Would Own
Crosetto and Macron reached the same conclusion by separate routes, naming no source of their own for the report. Officials in Brussels added no clarity either. The European Commission said only that it knew of the media coverage, with no knowledge of a specific alert from Washington.
The dismissal stands awkwardly against recent history. A Swedish naval unit had already tracked a drone launching from a Russian intelligence ship in the Öresund Strait.
An armed drone had already forced an airport near Leipzig to close for hours.
Set against such a record, the three named governments answered with denial and no inquiry into who wrote the dossier or why.
The Unannounced Errand to Moscow
The gap behind each denial rests on one absence. No formal channel had confirmed who briefed whom, or under what authority, before El Mundo published its report. Paris and Rome reacted to a newspaper account instead of a diplomatic cable.
John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow explains why no such channel existed. He boarded a military transport without advance word from the White House then resurfaced in the Russian capital roughly eight hours later.
President Trump publicly waved away any claim that the visit carried a warning to the Kremlin.
A trip run this way, off the record and contradicted by the president who authorised it, leaves European governments with no official statement to check against the leaked account, only Washington’s silence and a Spanish byline.
The Precedent Three Years Old
Reluctance to accept an American warning without independent proof played out three years earlier, before Russia’s war against Ukraine began.
Josep Borrell, then the European Union’s foreign policy chief, admitted years afterward to having resisted Washington’s warnings almost to the final hour. “We did not believe that the war was coming,” he recalled.
Dutch intelligence services held onto their own source inside Russia’s security apparatus even as Washington pressed its case.
The stance was later coloured by memory of the false case Washington built against Iraq’s weapons programme more than two decades earlier.
Germany carried a similar hesitation into its own assessment, wary of American pressure that might pull Europe toward a war it could otherwise avoid.
Paris reached nearly the same conclusion independently, suspicious of an account that served Washington’s interests as much as Europe’s security.
Britain and Poland, bound to Washington through direct intelligence-sharing arrangements and a shared seat in NATO, accepted Washington’s warning weeks before the war began.
Trust Split Along Old Lines
The same divide that separated Warsaw from Berlin in 2022 still separates the capitals named in the drone dossier.
Countries wired into Washington’s intelligence apparatus through direct channels treat American warnings as material for action.
France, Italy and Spain, holding their own sovereign services and their own memory of Iraq, wait for independent confirmation before they act on a claim delivered secondhand.
Rome and Madrid, lacking a formal channel to Washington’s spies, have no equivalent of the direct briefings that let Warsaw act on the 2022 warning within weeks.
The missing channel, not any particular disregard for the threat, explains why these governments answered a drone warning with denial and no investigation of their own.
A Habit Still Worth Breaking
The Gerbera warning may or may not prove accurate. Either way, the three governments will again decide how much unproven American intelligence to trust before an attack settles the question for them.
Southern European governments would do well to build the kind of independent verification capacity Britain and Poland already have, drawing on their own maritime and signals intelligence instead of a foreign newspaper’s sources.
This capacity would let Madrid, Paris and Rome verify a warning against their own evidence instead of choosing between denial and belated alarm.
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