The appearance of Chinese Feilong-1 and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones on the runway of the Al Khadim air base in Cyrenaica – confirmed by updated satellite images in recent weeks – is not the umpteenth crack in a UN embargo that has been worn out since 2011 but rather proof that that embargo no longer binds operations on the ground and survives only as a rhetorical formula in the reports of the UN Panel of Experts and the moribund UNSMIL mission. Here we are not dealing with clandestine trafficking, like those of the Chinese Wing Loong IIs supplied by the Emirates in the past and seized in the port of Gioia Tauro in 2024, now drones arrive, integrate and operate in a visible and persistent way: ground control stations, dedicated hangars, foreign technical personnel. To sustain such a presence requires a stable ecosystem, continuous logistics, bases like Al Khadim that have been operational for years. And that is exactly what Haftar’s Libya offers today, turning an international ban into a decorative element of a much larger architecture.

The failure of the United Nations in Libya lies not in blindness, but in a paradoxical hypermetropia: the Panel of Experts sees everything, documents every serial number and charts every route, but its reports have become the notarised chronicle of structural impotence. The embargo is now a transaction cost that only affects minor players, while it serves as a smokescreen for the big powers. The paralysis of the Security Council has turned UNSMIL into a purely ceremonial mission, capable of managing form but totally incapable of affecting the substance of Libyan political processes. In this vacuum of authority, breaking the norm is no longer an act of defiance, but an operational prerequisite. The coexistence of Chinese and Turkish technologies under the umbrella of Khalifa Haftar’s LNA reveals an established balance. UN monitoring records violations, but does not correct them.

Libya embodies this gap between form and substance before any other theatre. Formal institutions persist: parallel governments in Tripoli and Benghazi, a formally united Central Bank, the National Oil Corporation that continues to manage oil contracts. Yet the real power flows elsewhere. It flows in energy rents with Haftar controlling 80 per cent of Libya’s oil fields, in arms flows, migration and smuggling. It is not statelessness, but an emptied state: a mere interface to legitimise global channels – European funding, diplomatic recognition, energy contracts – while the real levers remain in the hands of the militias and the LNA, free of any accountability constraints. The embargo, in this framework, is part of it: it is invoked for reasons of morality, but evaded out of necessity.

The logistics corridor: not a metaphor, but the backbone

What are those drones really for? The answer is not to be sought in a logic of classical military offence, but in the need to secure an extractive and logistical infrastructure. Today, Libya is the terminal segment of a transnational corridor that welds the Sahel to the Mediterranean: a network that coordinates the routes of the Fezzan, the strategic nodes of Cyrenaica and the maritime port of Tobruk. In this context, drones act as a perimeter surveillance system for an immense open-air warehouse. They monitor otherwise impenetrable deserts, neutralise asymmetric threats before they can disrupt traffic and, above all, make predictable a territory that geography would like to be chaotic. It is this predictability that guarantees the value of Libya S.p.A.: the certainty that the corridor remains open and safe for those with the access codes, with Moscow acting as gatekeeper. We are no longer facing a territory to be governed, but a highway to be guarded. In this context, the link with Sudan is not an anecdotal detail. The Sudanese civil war produces valuable resources – gold, fuel, fighters – that need a logistical circuit to turn into power. Haftar deployed troops on the border in January 2026, in the Jebel Uweinat region, together with the RSF leader Hemeti, opening a route through the Fezzan to bring in Pakistani weapons. Thus Al Khadim becomes a hub for the Russian Africa Corps, useful for projections in the Sahel, where Moscow manages rotations between Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali. We are no longer dealing with a simple local rearmament: it is a transnational infrastructure of illegal enrichment and systemic instability.

This is where Russia’s role becomes central. The Africa Corps, heir to the Wagner group, does not just supply mercenaries or protect oil terminals. It acts as the armed notary of the Libyan duopoly: it certifies on the ground the informal agreements between Tripoli and Benghazi, guarantees the continuity of flows, and makes the division of rents credible. Without this guarantee, the fragile cohabitation between the armed elites would collapse.

In this scheme, external actors no longer compete according to Cold War logic; they cooperate like partners in a holding company, distributing functions according to their specialisations. The United Arab Emirates acts as the financial lung and the connector of diplomatic and business networks. Turkey, while maintaining its historic garrison in Tripolitania, is progressively filtering eastwards: recent contacts between Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin and Saddam Haftar signal that economic pragmatism has overcome ideological barriers. It is no longer the victory of one faction that is sought, but the stability of profit and transit.

Pakistan’s entry into the Libyan theatre adds a further layer of technical complexity. The sending of advanced weapon systems, including JF-17 fighter jets, is not a simple military export, but the extension of an Asian influence that uses Islamabad as a bridgehead. Behind Pakistan moves, indirectly but constantly, China, which prefers not to get its hands dirty with the direct management of militias, but provides the technology and infrastructure necessary for Libya S.p.A. to operate on global standards. It is an assembly line that transforms Cyrenaica into a technology platform where drones and jets are not used to wage war, but to ensure that no one interrupts the value chain of partners.

The Big Misunderstanding: Europe and the Tap Trap

As Libya’s military-industrial complex consolidates, Europe – with Italy in the front row – continues to watch the dial through the keyhole of the migration emergency. Reducing a Eurasian logistics hub to a simple tap to be opened or closed at will is a fatal category error. Brussels and Rome continue to negotiate with actors such as Dbeibah or the self-styled Libyan Coast Guard believing that they are interlocuting with state authorities; they ignore the fact that these actors are now employees or minority partners in a Russian and Middle Eastern architecture. Libya is not a border police problem: it is the terminal of a power projection that the West has given up understanding.

In this debacle, the posture of the Meloni government marks the transition from strategy to transactional capitulation. Beneath the rhetorical surface of the Mattei Plan, Italy has given up exerting political influence to merely finance its own irrelevance. The case of Almasri’s release – and the complicit silence on figures like Bija – is not a diplomatic incident, but the epiphany of this debacle. It is proof that the government has agreed to sell out the International Criminal Court and the principles of international law to pander to the wishes of traffickers. Releasing wanted war criminals is not political realism, it is certification that the gatekeepers have more power than the Italian state. In this purchasing office set up at the Ministry of the Interior, Italy does not buy security; it buys permission to continue to delude itself, while Libya S.p.A. expels us permanently from the strategic quadrant.

The EU supports interlocutors who are part of the fragmented status quo, while Haftar negotiates national unification from a position of strength, with oil in his fist and Russian support as collateral. The acquisition of the drones, from this perspective, does not represent an escalation of the Libyan war. It is rather the maturation of a platform that integrates war, economics and logistics under the control of external actors, with Russia as the strategic pivot. Treating all this as merely a migratory emergency is not only short-sighted: it is a way of legitimising the order that Europe says it wants to oppose.

To get out of this trap, the EU must abandon rhetoric and act on three fronts. If it is unwilling to strike at those who feed this system – starting with the Emirati financiers and the Russian device on the ground – the EU will continue to finance it indirectly, while pretending to contain it. Otherwise, Libya S.p.A. will continue to redefine our neighbourhood. The embargo will remain a notarised seal on a system we never really wanted to see, while Russia will continue to write the rules of the game in the central Mediterranean. And Europe will find itself living within an order it did not help to build.