Belgium – host to NATO HQ, SHAPE, the EU Commission, and one of Europe’s densest intelligence ecosystems – sits at the geopolitical center of Western defense and policymaking. Any sustained pressure campaign against Brussels is, by definition, a signal toward the entire Western intelligence and defense alliance structure. In the current climate of high-intensity proxy competition between Russia and NATO, the campaign unfolding over Belgian airspace and cyberspace fits the doctrinal blueprint of strategic hybrid harassment and gray-zone destabilization.
Belgium has long been a symbolic and strategic fulcrum in the European security landscape. For that reason, any hostile activity directed toward Belgium is never solely about Belgian territory. It is about exerting pressure on the Western command architecture itself. Recent events, from mysterious drone activity above sensitive military sites and major civilian airports to coordinated cyber disruptions and propaganda campaigns directed at the person of the Belgian Minister of Defense, follow the pattern of Russia applying a hybrid warfare doctrine to remind NATO that no city, no airspace, and no public narrative is outside its reach.
Aerial Interference: Drones Probing Vulnerability & Psychological Pressure
The most visible layer of this campaign has manifested this week in Belgian skies. At the country’s most critical civilian airport, Brussels Airport, as well as at military airbases and military-sensitive zones, unidentified drones have been repeatedly sighted maneuvering, circling, and probing flight corridors and restricted airspace. Each incident is more than a technical violation; it is a calculated friction operation designed to force response cycles, generate delays, test security readiness, and expose the inevitable vulnerabilities that surface when civilian aviation and security systems are stressed. Flights have been redirected, travelers disrupted, and airport security posture heightened — all of which contribute to a subtle but important psychological effect. More than 50 flights were canceled at Brussels Airport on Tuesday evening. In a nation central to NATO and the European project, the basic assumption of protected airspace is unsettled, replaced by a creeping sense that malign actors can reach into daily life without crossing conventional military thresholds.
These airborne incursions reflect recognizable patterns seen in previous Russian attributed gray-zone operations across Europe and NATO territory. Norway reported drone overflights around Oslo Airport. The Czech army announced on September 10 that it was detecting an increasing number of unidentified drones flying over its military facilities. Drones disrupted air traffic at six Danish airports in September, including Copenhagen, the Nordic region's busiest airport. Three Russian military jets violated NATO member Estonia's airspace for 12 minutes on September 19, before NATO Italian fighter jets escorted them out. The Berlin and Bremen airports briefly closed after two separate drone sightings. Drones were also spotted at military installations across Germany earlier in October. NATO member Lithuania closed Vilnius Airport and Belarus border crossings on October 28, after several objects, identified as likely helium balloons, entered its airspace. Some 20 Russian drones entered Poland's airspace on the night of September 9. Romania scrambled fighter jets on September 13, when a drone breached the country's airspace during a Russian attack on Ukrainian infrastructure near the border. Flight operations at Palma de Mallorca Airport were suspended on October 20 following drone sightings. Belgium now joins that list, not because it is weak, but because it is strategically irreplaceable. Drones circling transport hubs and defense perimeters serve to collect intelligence, test reaction times, divert resources, and silently convey the message that surveillance and influence are omnipresent. It is warfare without missiles, but it is warfare nonetheless.
The Cyber Dimension: Noname057(16)
As the drones challenge Belgium in the physical dimension, the cyber and information fronts are running in parallel. Pro-Russian hacktivist group NoName057(16) has been steadily intensifying its focus on Belgian networks. Government websites have faced disruption attempts. Internet service providers — the backbone of national connectivity — have been targeted by DDoS attacks aimed at degrading services and frustrating citizens. These attacks are not engineered to collapse the country’s digital infrastructure outright; rather, they are tuned to irritation, to create stress, and to leave the public questioning the state’s cyber resilience. Hybrid campaigns thrive on cumulative discomfort, the kind that never crosses the line into open hostilities but never allows society to feel fully secure.
Alongside the technical disruption comes the psychological shaping. NoName057(16) weaponized information by circulating narratives that were taken out of context from the Belgian Minister of Defense, who allegedly called for “wiping Moscow off the face of the earth.” The original context of this statement was during a discussion about the nuclear threat when the Minister at some point said: “Putin knows that if he uses nuclear weapons, they will wipe Moscow off the face of the earth,” and with ‘they’ he was referring to the US. Sure, it is probably not the brightest of statements a Minister of Defense could make during a media interview, but he did not call to wipe Moscow. This tactic of blending narratives out of context, amplification, and strategic attribution is part of a doctrine of reflexive control. The intention is to paint Western leaders as aggressors, escalate domestic and international tensions, and justify retaliatory posturing while sowing doubt among Belgian citizens about the judgment and rhetoric of their own officials. In the world of information warfare, perception becomes a battlefield. The target is not infrastructure; it is legitimacy, trust, and the social contract between the state and the public.
Figure 1: Message posted by NoName057(16) motivating their attack campaign targeting Belgium (source: Telegram)
Pressure on Critical Logistics: DHL
Beyond airports, ministries, and telecom nodes, another layer of Belgium’s infrastructure feels the reverberations of hybrid pressure: logistics. Logistics providers are more than mere commercial actors. They are strategic nodes in national and alliance resilience. Among them, DHL stands out, both as a backbone of Belgian commerce and as a critical artery feeding NATO, EU institutions, diplomatic circuits, and high-value industry across the continent.
When drone incursions force delays or closures at Brussels Airport, the largest air cargo gateway in Belgium, the effect ripples directly into DHL’s operational heartbeat. Flights carrying priority medical shipments, semiconductor components and diplomatic consignments were held on the tarmac or diverted. The ripple does not stop with aircraft. Freight cycles shift off-balance. Delivery timetables stretch. Even a two-hour disruption becomes a multiplier event across the delivery network, amplifying uncertainty through thousands of downstream nodes.
Hybrid warfare thrives on exactly this sort of subtle drag. Customers notice delays but cannot point to an adversary. Businesses adjust schedules without recognizing they are reacting to geopolitical pressure. The system does not break; it thins, stretches, and stumbles, just enough to remind policymakers and companies that their operational world rests on fragile foundations.
The digital dimension compounds the effect. A logistics giant like DHL operates on a nervous system of automated routing systems, cloud-integrated warehouse controls, customs pre-clearance APIs, and routing intelligence tied directly to live transport capacity. When pro-Russian cyber proxies harass Belgian ISPs, DHL’s interfaces can experience intermittent interference, resulting in degraded customer visibility, stalling shipment tracking, and the formation of automated customs clearance queues. Workers shift from coordinated automation to manual fallback. Once again, nothing collapses, but everything becomes heavier.
Hybrid conflict rarely aims to destroy logistics; it aims to weaponize inconvenience. If the public begins to associate instability and supply chain friction with geopolitical tension, fatigue sets in. If businesses start to feel the fragility of just-in-time logistics in Europe’s political capital, confidence wavers. That is the deeper strategic line here. Disrupting or slowing DHL operations is not about packages; it is about tempo. The speed with which institutions operate, the efficiency with which a region conducts its economic and diplomatic life, and the quiet assumption that logistics infrastructure is dependable. Hybrid adversaries understand that undermining these expectations is a form of power.
Strategic Interpretation
Taken together, the drone incursions, digital strikes, and coordinated propaganda illustrate a cohesive Russian approach to modern conflict. Belgium is not being “attacked” in a classical sense, but it is being subjected to a pressure campaign calibrated to weaken confidence, impose costs, and stretch situational awareness across multiple domains. The objective is strategic fatigue, not victory through destruction but influence through erosion. Every diverted police patrol, every delayed aircraft, every jitter in public communications, and every false narrative that enters the social bloodstream contributes to the slow grind of uncertainty. Hybrid warfare prefers the long game, the disruptive whisper over the explosive headline.
As this campaign evolves, Belgium and its allies should anticipate further experimentation and escalation across both technical and psychological vectors. Drone probes may become more frequent or more technologically coordinated, potentially shifting toward swarm patterns to overwhelm defenses or saturate air surveillance systems. Cyber operations may broaden to target telecom routing or satellite infrastructure. Propaganda efforts could grow more aggressive, leveraging deepfake synthetic media crafted to introduce plausible-seeming but entirely fabricated diplomatic statements or private conversations. Hybrid conflict thrives on ambiguity, deniability, and the ability to make truth itself feel negotiable.
What is playing out over Belgian airfields and within its digital corridors is not an isolated provocation. It is a live demonstration of Russia’s commitment to asymmetric power projection in Europe’s political core. Brussels represents NATO’s brain and Europe's central nervous system. If Russia can induce confusion, hesitation, or doubt there, even briefly, it ripples outward into the alliance structure. In hybrid warfare, the battlefield is everywhere: above airports, across fiber networks, inside social feeds, and ultimately in the perceptions of policymakers and citizens. Belgium stands in a familiar but intensified role as a symbol to test.
This moment is a reminder: security is no longer defined by borders and soldiers alone. It is defined by airspaces patrolled by silent machines, by networks pulsed with synthetic traffic, and by narratives shaped in real time by digital proxies. The question is not whether Belgium is under attack. The question is whether Europe recognizes that this is what modern conflict looks like—and whether it is prepared to respond in kind.