When Russian drones entered Poland on the night of 9–10 September, I was across the border in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. As has happened so often since February 2022, sirens had warned of incoming missiles and drones and the air-alert map had turned red across all of Ukraine.
Taking refuge, like many others, in a bomb shelter, I followed news of a massive wave of drones moving westward across Ukraine. Soon, news channels were reporting that several had crossed into Poland and Rzeszów airport, in Poland’s southeast, had been closed for security reasons. By early morning, news reached us that airports in Warsaw and Lublin had also been shut down.
The fact that many of the drones were unarmed didn’t lessen their significance. Some recent Western intelligence sources have suggested that they may simply have been sent off their course by Ukraine’s jamming — a theory also advanced by intelligence sources in Russia’s ally, Belarus — but events since then strongly suggest the incursions were deliberate.
Experts note that Russia could have been targeting Poland strategically to disrupt logistical support for Ukraine, given that Poland’s border regions are crucial transport arteries. The drones’ route followed logistics corridors to Ukraine, particularly targeting Rzeszów airport, a vital hub for military and humanitarian aid. By threatening Poland, Russia could also be seeking to undermine NATO’s credibility and pressure Kyiv towards unrealistic peace talks. Equally troubling, Russia has now tested NATO’s response times and decision-making processes, exposing vulnerabilities it could exploit in the near future.
Later that week, on 13 September, Russian drones crossed into Romania. Moscow dismissed them as “unidentified flying objects.” Romanian F-16s tracked them but did not engage. Then, on 19 September, Russian fighter jets breached Estonian airspace, lingering twelve minutes before Italian jets responded. Estonia has now also invoked Article 4, another sign of growing alarm.
Equally ominously, Russian and Belarusian forces have launched a series of Zapad-2025 (West-2025) military training drills near Lithuania’s border. Does anyone still remember the similar drills on Ukraine’s border in December 2021 — drills that supposedly “meant nothing”? It is now a rhetorical question: ask Ukrainians who are still fighting and living through this war.
The danger lies not only in the drones themselves but also in the political hesitancy they have highlighted across Europe. Ukraine’s experience should be a warning: the danger signs began with Russia’s unidentified “green men” in Crimea in 2014 and continued with the so-called “hybrid war” in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They culminated in the West’s slow response to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Each time, the caution emboldened the aggressor, becoming a weakness.
Yet many European and world politicians remain reluctant to acknowledge this. Such blindness is dangerous: what starts as an incident involving “unidentified drones” or an “unintentional” violation of airspace could escalate into a mass-scale strike on critical infrastructure, government buildings and the peaceful population sleeping at night.
Although Polish authorities initially referred to the drones as “objects,” their attitude hardened the following day. The government declared a no-fly zone within thirteen kilometres of the Ukrainian border, closed the border with Belarus, and imposed airspace restrictions in Poland’s eastern regions until 9 December. Prime minister Donald Tusk told parliament that the country faced an “enemy that did not hide its hostile intentions” and his government invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, requesting security guarantees. An important step, yes — but it comes in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale war in neighbouring Ukraine. Poland also successfully requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss the violation of its airspace.
Polish authorities have since announced that their anti-drone units will receive training in Ukraine, drawing on the extensive experience accumulated by military forces there. But is this enough, given Russia’s history of aggression and its capacity to send up to 500 drones per day in the near future?
Among the incident’s other consequences was the activation of high-level NATO discussions and public statements. Member states quickly realised that one of their allies could be under threat. Yet no decisive action followed — not for NATO’s collective protection, not even in the form of additional sanctions or clear deadlines.
Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski floated the idea that NATO should begin shooting down Russian drones over Ukrainian territory. Russia immediately declared that such a move would mean open war with NATO. This is hardly the first time Moscow has issued such an ultimatum: it has threatened war against NATO if its members sent weapons to Ukraine or if Ukraine attacked targets inside Russia — both “red lines” that have since been crossed. The real question is why the option of intercepting drones over Ukraine was not discussed seriously well before those nineteen drones entered Poland. How many Ukrainian lives could have been saved?
This is precisely the moment to recognise the shift in Russia’s war against Ukraine: it is no longer contained within Ukrainian borders but has already become a war against Europe. Russia is testing NATO, probing the defences of its member states, and signalling its imperialistic view that no Eastern European country is beyond reach. Whether Europe treats this as a wake-up call or another passing headline may shape the continent’s security for years to come.
NATO’s and Poland’s “concerns” have continued to mount. What comes next, and at what scale, if Russian drones can target Poland’s capital, where one of last week’s drones was shot down — something few could have imagined when missiles, bombs and drones first began falling over Kyiv?
Is Poland ready for hybrid or even full-scale war with Russia? Is Europe? The evidence suggests otherwise. Of the nineteen drones, only four were destroyed in the air. Former Polish president Andrzej Duda conceded Poland lacks adequate counter-drone systems, relying instead on aircraft interception, an inefficient and outdated response to the speed and scale of the modern drone warfare.
Looking back ten days later, the separate incursions appear to have been part of a series of well-planned acts of hybrid warfare. For three and a half years, Ukraine has borne the brunt of Russia’s full-scale war. Now the focus has shifted westward. Russia is probing NATO’s weak points, testing whether symbolic gestures and verbal reassurances will continue substituting for real defence measures. So far, neither Poland, Romania nor Estonia has responded decisively.
As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stressed, these are systematic actions demanding a systematic, collective response. At this week’s emergency UN Security Council session, Sikorsky foreshadowed that any Russian missile or aircraft entering NATO airspace “either deliberately or by mistake” would be shot down. The European Union is preparing to meet with Ukraine and other Eastern European countries to discuss the creation of a “drone wall” along its eastern border, but experts warn that building such defence system might take at least a year.
Will Europe and NATO be ready for the next “incursion”? What role will the United States take in shaping collective security along the eastern borders of NATO? Why, despite support for Ukraine’s war effort, has nothing been done over the past three and a half years to prepare for such an eventuality, especially given the murderous, mass-scale, drone attacks already carried out against Ukraine? Why was Europe not been more concerned by the hundreds of armed drones flying daily over the heads of Ukrainians?
The uncomfortable truth is that NATO countries have not adequately prepared for such incidents, nor learned from Ukraine’s hard-earned experience in countering drone warfare. With limited resources, Ukraine has already developed a layered, adaptive defence system. NATO states, with much greater political and economic means, lag behind. Unless Europe, Ukraine and NATO work quickly on political unity, coordinating defence systems, and rapid decision-making, the question will not be whether but when Russia escalates further against NATO infrastructure — and how devastating its consequences will be for Europe and especially for Ukraine. •
