After the incident that closed the airports in Copenhagen and Oslo due to unidentified drones that were not shot down, authorities in Denmark and Norway can only hypothesize what type of UAVs were used and who operated them. They are also tallying the economic losses from four hours of closures, which forced about 20,000 passengers to wait, cancel plans, or divert to other airports.Ukrainian Defense Express media and consulting company has analyzed the situation."It is worth noting that despite the lack of drone debris, these were unlikely to be ordinary consumer quadcopters. All such drones are subject to so-called no-fly zones around airports and other critical sites, which prevent them from being controlled there. More likely in this case, we are talking about fixed-wing UAVs with electric motors," the company's experts said.Footage published earlier tonight by Norwegian state media, claiming to show one of the large, unidentified drones that shutdown Copenhagen Airport in Denmark for several hours on Monday. pic.twitter.com/IeosEuRd7n— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) September 23, 2025 Danish police believe the drone operator or operators were quite skilled. They also put forward an intriguing hypothesis: the drones could have been launched from a ship in the Baltic Sea. That raises the question whether Russia could do something similar from a vessel—for example, from one of the shadow-fleet tankers. "The answer is fairly simple: yes, it is more than feasible," Defense Express says.Pneumatic or elastic catapults are commonly used to launch reconnaissance drones and decoys such as the Gerbera drone. Moreover, Russia has already practiced launching UAVs from ships. Back in 2020, ZALA conducted demonstration launches from a boat while underway. In October 2024, it resumed such experiments, this time from a largely stationary offshore platform. Those tests involved not only reconnaissance drones but also the Lancet drone."Launching drones from a tanker or almost any civilian vessel poses no great difficulty. At the same time, Russia has long worked out technologies for controlling UAVs via mobile networks or using mesh networks. Using such tactics—well within the bounds of hybrid warfare and gradual escalation—Russia could try to create chaos in European airspace, causing significant economic damage at minimal cost to itself," the experts conclude.This kind of launch also upends calculations of drone ranges from Russian or Belarusian territory toward European countries. And it must be considered that the vessel itself could be located in international waters.