Provocation, mistake, or something in between? Either Putin sent Russian drones into Poland’s airspace on Tuesday night to test Nato’s reaction, or Ukrainian electronic jamming scrambled the targeting systems on Russian drones and sent them haywire. Or perhaps the Kremlin is playing a grey-zone game, launching an accidentally-on-purpose attack to push Europe’s boundaries.
The problem with the Kremlin testing the boundaries theory is that it doesn’t make much political or military sense
Whatever Putin’s intent, the shooting down of several drones marks the first time ever that Nato warplanes have engaged and destroyed Russian weapons in European airspace. Though Polish prime minister Donald Tusk noted that ‘there is no reason to claim that we are in a state of war’ he did call the incursion ‘significantly more dangerous than all previous ones’ and warned that a military conflict with Russia is ‘closer than at any time since the second world war.’
The problem with the Kremlin testing the boundaries theory is that it doesn’t make much political or military sense. Poland’s relations with Ukraine are already souring, which is exactly how the Kremlin wants it. Just days ago Polish President Karol Nawrocki said that he believed that Ukraine’s accession to Nato should be ‘postponed’ because of the risk of automatically involving allies in a conflict with Russia. He added that discussions about Ukraine’s EU membership were ‘premature’, stressing that such processes ‘require time and the consideration of economic factors.’ Decoded, Nawrocki fears that Poland’s agricultural sector will be undercut by cheap Ukrainian produce, and Kyiv will receive all the EU subsidies that currently go to Warsaw. Poland also recently ended most benefits payments to Ukrainian refugees settled in its territory.
Why, when relations between Poland and Ukraine are heading into choppy waters, would Putin wish to rekindle their solidarity by attacking Polish territory directly?
Militarily, too, it’s not clear what the purpose of a deliberate Russian ‘probing attack’ might be. The drones seem to have flown in different directions, one ending up 275 kilometres into Polish territory toward Warsaw while the others were shot down around Rzesow in the south-east of the country. A true test of Poland’s air defences would presumably involve a concentrated attack on a specific target. And Shahed drones – and their Russian-made clones, known as Geran – are a strange way to test defences as they are notoriously slow and heavy, unlike Russian cruise missiles or indeed hypersonic rockets like the nuclear-capable Kinzhal. The military utility of Shahed attacks is to overwhelm air defence batteries by sheer force of numbers, relying on just 10 or 20 per cent of the drone swarm getting through.
Another piece of evidence that the incursion may not have been deliberate are reports indicating that after the drones went Awol into Polish airspace some Russian strategic bombers aborted their missions, returning to base without launching their cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets. If true, it could suggest that Russian commanders were wary of escalating the war beyond Ukrainian territory.
This week Russia and Belarus are about to commence scheduled joint military exercise dubbed Zapad-2025, designed to test their response to a western attack on Russia. For decades, the annual ritual of the Zapad war-games have been a moment of heightened tension for Poland and the Baltic states. To deliberately stage a serious provocation against Nato on the eve of the exercise would be a reckless and foolish move by the Kremlin. But then again the whole full-scale invasion of Ukraine was in itself a massive act of recklessness and folly.
What is clear is that Putin is very serious about smashing Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure before winter sets in. The massive swarms of missiles and drones that Russia has been sending almost nightly set new records for their scale. A major target seems to be military supply hubs for Nato materiel around Lviv, Lutsk and Rivne – all close to Ukraine’s border with Poland.
In the wake of the drone incursion Tusk invoked Nato’s Article Four for only the seventh time since the alliance was founded, calling on allies to ‘consult’ in case of a threat. That will be an important test of Donald Trump’s attitude to Nato. Last week Trump had said that ‘we are with Poland all the way and we will help Poland protect itself.’ Blasting Nato’s European members as free riders has been a long-time Trump talking point. But in July EU leaders pledged to up their contributions to 5 per cent of GDP – and Nato’s secretary general Mark Rutte called Trump ‘Daddy’. Whether this has fundamentally changed Trump’s attitude to Nato remains to be seen.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her State of the Union address vowed that Europe would apply ‘more pressure on Russia to come to the negotiating table. We need more sanctions.’ France’s Emmanuel Macron called the airspace violation ‘simply unacceptable… We will not compromise on the safety of our allies.’ But so far nothing that Nato, or Europe, has done so far has succeeded in deterring Putin or swerving him from his systematic campaign to crush Ukraine.
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