NATO Steps Up Defenses After Russian Drones Violate Polish Airspace

Increased air patrols, air defense systems and other protections will be mobilized over Eastern Europe.

NATO’s top leaders announced new efforts on Friday to step up air defenses in the alliance’s eastern flank after Russian drones that flew into Poland this week revealed how easily the war in Ukraine could spill over borders.

Increased air patrols, ground-based interceptor systems, sensors and heightened surveillance will be mobilized, officials said. The military operation, called Eastern Sentry, will initially focus on Poland but can be shifted elsewhere in the region as needed.

“Russia’s recklessness in the air along our eastern flank is increasing in frequency,” said NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, who added that adversarial drones also have recently violated the airspace of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania.

It remains unclear why the Russian drones entered Poland shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Mr. Rutte said, but “whether intentional or not, it is dangerous and unacceptable.”

Britain, Denmark, France and Germany pledged to send forces and equipment for the operation, which U.S. Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the alliance’s top military commander, said would begin immediately. It will also include technology designed to counter drones.

Officials have said around 20 drones flew into Poland, prompting NATO, a mutual-defense alliance, to scramble warplanes to shoot them down.

Russia has previously said it did not target Poland and that the drones went off track after their navigation systems were jammed. But at a session of the U.N. Security Council on Friday it claimed the drones could not have even reached Polish airspace, which is false.

“There were no targets marked on Polish territory,” Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s U.N. ambassador, told the council. “The maximum range of the drones used in this strike did not exceed 700 kilometers, which makes it physically impossible for them to have reached Polish territory.”

In fact, some of the sites where Polish officials said drone debris fell are less than 600 kilometers from Russia’s main territory to the east. In addition, a small piece of Russia, separate from the main body, lies even closer, to the north, bordering Poland directly.

Mr. Nebenzya’s assertions were rejected by Poland’s representative and several other members of the council. “We know, and I repeat, we know that it was not a mistake,” said Poland’s Secretary of State Marcin Bosacki.

Polish F-16 fighters, Dutch F-35 fighters, German Patriot air defense systems and an Italian AWACS surveillance aircraft were all deployed, and three of the drones were downed. Others crashed, including near villages in eastern Poland.

It was the first direct engagement of troops from NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — with Russian weaponry since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The drone penetration also was largely seen as not just a test of NATO’s defenses, but also its political resolve to push back against Russia.

Wreckage of the drones revealed them to be cheap aircraft, nicknamed “Gerbera,” typically made of plywood and Styrofoam. That an adversary could threaten NATO with such flimsy weapons, compared with the multimillion-dollar systems used to shoot them down, raised questions about whether the alliance had been too complacent about its airspace even as war raged next door in Ukraine.

General Grynkewich said that Wednesday’s incursion “was obviously larger” than earlier ones, “so bringing additional resources to bear on this problem will help to solve that.”

Some of the drones entered Poland from Belarus, where joint military exercises with Russia started on Friday. Belarusian officials, however, were quick to try to distance their country from the incursion, saying they had called Warsaw to warn about it.

In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky told generals and diplomats at a security conference that the drone incursion required a “response” from NATO, lest Russia grow more emboldened.

Also speaking at the conference, the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb, suggested an appropriate response could be arming Ukraine with weapons of sufficient range to strike Russian drone factories, limiting the risk of such attacks at the source.

“It would be quite useful to provide something that could take those down,” Mr. Stubb said.

Mr. Zelensky said the United States — not European nations or international groups like the United Nations — must play the decisive role in bringing an end to the war, the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.

“The United States has the power to influence Putin,” Mr. Zelensky said. He opened the conference, called YES, by noting a relative calm had settled over Kyiv on Friday. Air raid sirens had gone quiet.

He credited it to Russian care not to harm Mr. Trump’s envoy to Ukraine for peace talks, the retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who was at the conference. Mr. Zelensky quipped that it was an effective defense and lamented that General Kellogg could not tour Ukraine more widely to safeguard other towns.

On Friday at the Security Council, Dorothy Shea, the acting U.S. ambassador to the U.N, said the United States would stand by its “NATO allies in the face of these alarming airspace violations.”

Russia had not held fire during visits by envoys of other nations, Mr. Zelensky said, highlighting what he said was potential American sway over Mr. Putin’s decisions.

Surrendering land in his country’s east in exchange for a cease-fire, as Russia has proposed, would not safeguard Ukraine against future attacks, Mr. Zelensky said. The United States will have to raise the costs on Russia, he said.

“We cannot have security guarantees unless we have a cease-fire,” Mr. Zelensky said, though he praised European pledges for a postwar peacekeeping force. “America is the one who can push Putin to dialogue.”

The new NATO campaign is modeled after Baltic Sentry, which increased ship patrols and surveillance jets and drones over the Baltic Sea in January after underwater communication cables and energy pipelines serving northern Europe were sabotaged. European officials have blamed Russia and China for most of the damage, which can cost millions of dollars to repair and billions of dollars in lost economic activity.

Baltic Sentry also sought to deter Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of oil tankers that has tried to evade attention through a range of deceptive maneuvers to defy international price caps on Russian oil exports.

Andrew E. Kramer, Valerie Hopkins and Pranav Baskar contributed reporting.

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