Putin has put NATO on the spot with the Russian drone incursion in Poland. What comes next? Analysis by Nick Paton WalshSeptember 11, 2025 at 3:49 AM 0 A police officer stands below as firefighters work on the destroyed roof of a house, after Russian drones violated Polish airspace during an attack ...
- - Putin has put NATO on the spot with the Russian drone incursion in Poland. What comes next?
Analysis by Nick Paton WalshSeptember 11, 2025 at 3:49 AM
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A police officer stands below as firefighters work on the destroyed roof of a house, after Russian drones violated Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine, with some being shot down by Poland with the backing from its NATO allies, in Wyryki, Lublin Voivodeship, Poland, September 10, 2025. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel - Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin's main target in the drone incursion into Poland was not necessarily the civilian home that was hit in the eastern town of Wyryki, or to close airspace around the capital Warsaw's busiest airport. The Kremlin head appears to have been aiming at NATO confidence and unity, with a partial glancing blow seemingly directed at US President Donald Trump.
The number of drones that crossed into Poland – 19 "breaches" were reported by Prime Minister Donald Tusk – leaves it harder to put the incident down to GPS spoofing, or jamming causing a navigation error. The debris is still being sifted, but most Shahed-type drones are pre-programmed to hit a target before launch, and if Moscow did not want the risk of crossing into the territory of a NATO member, it could have steered clear of risky areas on the Poland-Ukraine border. The Russians have done so for the most part over the past three years, since they invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Russia's defense ministry said Wednesday it had not targeted Polish sites, and wanted dialogue over the incident. But the scale of the intrusion makes these excuses hard to digest. Recent history is littered with "gray zone" behavior by Moscow, in which the envelope of its escalatory actions widens, even if Russia later insists an incident was an error, or blames another party.
Instead, the scene Wednesday early morning was unprecedented: Polish airspace closed. NATO jets scrambled. Civilian homes damaged by debris. The Russian goal may be to sow chaos in one of NATO and Eastern Europe's more hawkish members, but it also seems to be to provoke and assess a response from a military bloc it has spent most of the Ukraine war eager to avoid clashing with directly.
What will NATO do now? This is the question Putin is now forcing on the alliance.
And the answer is one the alliance must give at an unprecedented stage in its history. Trump has eroded the bedrock of security guarantees Europe has relied on for decades. It has led to a key American goal – a rise in pledges of European defense spending. But it has also undermined the basic tenet of transatlantic security – that if you attack a European NATO member, you guarantee an American military response. That may still be the case, but the conditional in this sentence is the spot through which Putin last night flew more than a dozen drones.
Delicate balance
The delicate balance for European NATO countries is to find a response that ensures Putin feels enough discomfort he does not make these intrusions a weekly event. But they must also not be so aggressive that they invite Moscow to escalate yet further, feeding its false narrative that when Russia unprovokedly invaded Ukraine, it entered into conflict with all of NATO.
And Europe faces perhaps a more crucial hurdle in terms of the White House's role in this response. How do they convince Trump to entangle himself in a tough riposte, and without damaging the "good relationship" he seems keen to retain with the Kremlin head, despite the increasing frustration of the US president?
The change in the NATO alliance under Trump is already palpable. In November 2022, when early reports blamed a Russian missile for straying into Poland and killing two Polish farmers, then-US President Joe Biden was traveling in Indonesia when told about the crisis.
The attack was later attributed to an errant Ukrainian missile, but Biden still convened an emergency meeting of the G7 in Bali to discuss the incident.
Thus far, Trump has failed to provide the iron-clan security guarantees that have been at the heart of the NATO alliance for decades. His Truth Social post: "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go!" falls significantly short of that, and seems oddly exhilarated by the prospect of the uncertainty ahead. It should be noted Trump said at the weekend he was ready to move on the next wave of sanctions against Moscow, and that he would be speaking to his Russian counterpart "very soon," and that European leaders would visit him in Washington DC either Monday or Tuesday. None of the above have happened.
Trump's acolytes may attribute this to his disruptive style, or agility, but to the Kremlin it does not project strength. To recap: since Saturday night, Russian drones or missiles have hit a key Ukrainian government building in Kyiv, killed 25 people in a single strike on a post office van handing out pensions in Donetsk, and now launched the most significant air incursion into NATO territory in its history, during which NATO jets scrambled and shot down Russian drones, also a historic first.
Trump's envoy to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, called Sunday's strikes on Kyiv an "escalation." It will be interesting to see how he describes the past 48 hours and whether Trump echoes, or absorbs, that sentiment.
Russia has, in these escalations, not suddenly brought back to life the tens of thousands of fighting-aged males it has squandered on the frontline in its war of choice. It remains strategically weaker than when the war started, but with two key differences.
Since this month's Tianjin summit and the remarkable scenes of bonhomie with China's Xi Jinping and India's Narendra Modi, Putin may well be feeling buoyed and able to escalate – as he has in the past days – with substantial economic and geopolitical support behind him. That will inform how long he thinks he can continue to fight.
Secondly, Putin is now engaged in a war that began as a weeks-long bid to swiftly overwhelm a weak neighbor, but that has now morphed into a fight for the survival of his worldview, likely his regime, and possibly himself.
The West is often prone to overestimate the threat Russia poses, but also underestimate Putin's commitment to his war. Whether they are able to match his application and escalation is the question of the days ahead.
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