German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said Berlin is close to announcing a response to the suspected drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport, coordinated with European Union and NATO partners.
He spoke on August 30, as media reports said the government was preparing to attribute the incident to Russia.
Speaking on ARD public television’s summer interview, Merz said investigators were “in the process of concluding the investigation”.
There was, he added, “broad consensus within the Federal Government on how we should respond, and we will make this clear in the coming days; it won’t be long now.”
He did not name a perpetrator. The response would come from Germany, he said, but “our partners in the European Union and NATO will not be taken by surprise.”
Final agreement with those partners was due “in the next few days”.
Asked whether Germany could respond adequately if Russian authorship were established, Merz said it was worth waiting to see what an adequate response meant.
Germany has not yet issued an official attribution.
A government spokesman, asked about reports that Berlin would hold Moscow responsible, said the Chancellery “does not engage in speculation” and that the only relevant step was an official attribution “after weighing all the results of the investigation”.
On August 4 an explosives-laden drone was found at Leipzig/Halle airport near a Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft used for military supplies.
Police used a robot to defuse the device. Investigators have said the detonator appeared faulty.
A second drone is suspected of colliding with a DHL cargo aircraft, which had to abandon its landing approach after the airport closed.
German media later reported a third drone discovered on August 14 west of the airport, together with about 50 grammes of a substance thought to be the military explosive hexogen (RDX).
The federal prosecutor’s office has led the inquiry and has declined to comment on some of those details.
Leipzig/Halle is a major cargo and logistics hub used by NATO allies and by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines.
A parcel caught fire at the airport in July 2024 in a container due to be loaded on to a DHL freighter, one of a series of incidents European security services have linked to Russia.
German interior minister Alexander Dobrindt called the episode a “hybrid attack” that marked “a new level of danger” and left open the possibility that a foreign power was involved.
Merz said on August 25 that Germany was “facing very real threats” and that those responsible for hybrid attacks would “pay a price”.
He also pointed to stronger drone defences and plans to give security services more scope to disrupt attackers, including by hacking servers.
On August 29 Politico and Welt am Sonntag, citing three officials familiar with the matter, reported that Merz’s government was preparing to blame Russia and to announce “extensive” measures, including direct steps against Russian entities alongside a new EU sanctions package being prepared in Brussels.
The announcement was expected in the opening days of September, possibly before the informal meeting of EU foreign ministers that Ireland’s Council presidency is hosting in Wicklow on September 1-2.
Officials said expelling individual diplomats or closing the Russian House in Berlin was no longer regarded as sufficient.
Options under discussion have included tougher national measures, further EU listings and increased military assistance to Ukraine.
The Kyiv Independent reported that US intelligence officials assessed on August 26 that an explosive drone showed signs of production linked to Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU.
Russia has denied involvement. After the August 4 discovery the Russian embassy in Berlin called the episode a “hastily contrived provocation” intended to blame Moscow and said the main danger facing Germany was not hybrid attacks from Russia, which it said did not exist, but “politicians who are enthusiastically developing scenarios for an imminent war with Russia”.
Moscow has not issued a detailed technical rebuttal of the later drone and explosive finds reported in the German press.
Adis Ahmetović, foreign policy spokesman for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group, has called for a united “European answer” if investigators conclude that Russia was responsible.
He told Der Spiegel that sanctions on Russia’s shadow fleet of sanctions-evading tankers were on the table, while warning against an “escalation spiral”.
The Greens called on Merz to take more decisive action against Russia over the incident.
“The federal government must finally stop being hesitant, evasive and faint-hearted,” deputy leader of the Greens parliamentary group Konstantin von Notz told Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, describing the Leipzig incident as a “military action”.
The government has not set out the legal or intelligence threshold it will use for public attribution.
🛩️ Drone with suspected explosives found near Ukrainian aircraft at Leipzig airport in Germany.
German investigators are treating the incident as a possible attempted attack.
Flight operations were temporarily suspended while forensic teams examined the scene.
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— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) August 6, 2026
