In the early hours of Wednesday morning, a joint force of Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s made a grim kind of history. Firing on an incoming swarm of Russian drones, their defence operation marked the first time that Nato forces directly engaged Russian military assets not merely since the start of the war in Ukraine — but since the height of the Cold War. Ominously, it was also the first time that Polish forces had mobilised to defend their own borders from a foreign threat since the Second World War.
A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.
Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.
While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signalling for the better part of a year.
“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-sceptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.
Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defence has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defence systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.
That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defence architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.
Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.
The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realise: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.
“Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years”
With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.
Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbours to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.
Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.
The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defence is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.
Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-sceptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.
Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defence or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbours will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarisation, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbours.
And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.
