The world is now closer to a full-scale war between NATO and Russia than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the early morning hours of September 10, 2025, Western air defenses spotted a fleet of Russian drones that had entered Poland’s airspace. Shortly thereafter, NATO fighter planes intercepted the intruders, shooting down 16 of them. NATO’s military forces also elevated their alert status.
Questions immediately arose about whether this episode was a deliberate provocation on Russia’s part, or simply a case in which Moscow’s contingent of unmanned drones heading for targets in Ukraine flew off course. Not surprisingly, high-level officials in both Warsaw and Kyiv, including Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, insisted that the airspace violation was intentional, despite the lack of definitive evidence. The Washington Post’s editorial board embraced a somewhat different argument, concluding that it really didn’t matter if the incursion was deliberate or not; in either case, the members believed that the situation amounted to a test of NATO’s air defenses and, more important, the Alliance’s “resolve.”
Hawks in many NATO countries also exploited the incident to argue that the Alliance needed to accelerate the pace of its ongoing military buildup and to boost its security solidarity with Ukraine. In other words, such advocates seek to escalate NATO’s existing proxy war that uses Kyiv as a tool to weaken Russia. The contemplated escalation would take the form of increasing the Alliance’s direct military involvement – even though that step would risk the outbreak of combat between Russian and NATO units. NATO leaders have now used the drone incident to adopt a new confrontational mission, dubbed Eastern Sentry.
Such a move would intensify NATO’s already alarming confrontation with Moscow. Ironically, a reasonably dispassionate assessment of the circumstances surrounding the drone episode would suggest that it was more likely an inadvertent intrusion than a hostile probe. At the same time that Alliance defenders were knocking the Russian drones out of Poland’s skies, Russian ally Belarus announced that it was taking similar action against such drones that had penetrated its airspace.
The nature of Minsk’s response indicated that a Russian drone fleet launched against Ukraine had been disrupted by Ukrainian or NATO electronic warfare measures, causing it to deviate onto a new course over Poland. It would be ironic if the Western powers had brought this problem on themselves through their own electronic warfare actions, but the overall circumstances suggest that that it is the most likely explanation.
Hellbound and Down 