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Western officials have concluded that the incursion was to probe their defenses.
Sept. 20, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ET
The Polish soldier had been at his post for hours one night last week, watching the latest bombardment of neighboring Ukraine on his radar screen, when he noticed an usual blip. Its trajectory was different from the hundreds of other Russian drones in the air that night.
It was headed toward Poland, toward home.
The soldier called his commanders, setting in motion a military operation not seen in most of Europe for 80 years. Air raid alarms sounded and fighter jets took to the sky. From his command post in Warsaw, Lt. Gen. Maciej Klisz mustered a polyglot force of Polish, German, Italian and Dutch soldiers on a NATO rotation. He waited for his pilots to visually confirm that the objects were indeed Russian drones and that they were pushing into alliance airspace. Then he ordered them to fire.
“There was no change to the course, so I said to my team, ‘Team, are you ready to rock ‘n’ roll?’” General Klisz, who oversaw the mission, said in an interview describing the operation.
The drone incursion was among the latest in a series of increasingly provocative moves by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed at NATO countries that include sabotage, murder and now military action. On Friday, three Russian fighter jets violated Estonia’s airspace for 12 minutes, an unusually long stretch.
The goal, according to officials and experts in Poland and elsewhere in alliance territory, was to probe the limits of Western resolve, search for weaknesses and lay the groundwork for any future confrontation.
“That’s the strategy of Putin’s Russia,” said Marcin Przydacz, the top foreign policy adviser to President Karol Nawrocki of Poland. “If they are not stopped by someone who is strong enough or stronger than them, they always move forward.”
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The drone incursion was the first time since World War II that the Polish armed forces had been mobilized to fight off a threat to their homeland, and the first time since NATO’s creation that allied forces had engaged an enemy in its airspace.
Mr. Putin exploited a moment of global tumult, with wars, partisan division and an unpredictable U.S. president all creating fissures in a security architecture built to insulate the West from the world’s perils.
In Poland, a government rived by partisanship responded with one voice, as did the leaders of major European countries. President Trump, after an initial ambiguous statement, came around, at least rhetorically, to the view of the other Western leaders that the drone crossover into Poland was unacceptable.
NATO forces dispatched the threat, though it turned out to be flimsier than it looked on radar. More than 20 drones entered Polish air space, most of them foam dummies that floated to the ground when they ran out of fuel. Three Shahed-style armed drones like the ones that menace Ukraine nightly were shot down, Polish officials said.
No deaths were reported, though a house in eastern Poland was damaged not by Russian drones but by a missile fired by a NATO aircraft, according to a Polish official with knowledge of the episode who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a military action. A cage housing rabbits was hit by one of the dummy drones, the official noted. The animals survived.
As in the past, Russian officials denied and obfuscated. The drones, affected by electronic warfare measures, could have veered off course, the Kremlin’s allies in neighboring Belarus said. The Russian Defense Ministry denied that it had drones in its arsenal capable of flying as far as Poland. On social media, bots and Kremlin proxies pushed a counternarrative suggesting that Ukraine had launched drones as a ruse to drag Poland into the war.
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Polish officials said they were certain that Russia had sent the drones on purpose. They were launched from Russian territory, near the border shared by Ukraine and Belarus, officials said. They flew a route over a forested region in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus far from any military targets in Ukraine and kept a steady bearing throughout the flight. They carried no munitions, but they were modified with larger fuel tanks or extra fuel tanks to hold the fuel required to make the journey, the officials said.
“We have no doubt that this was an intentional incursion and I would say an intentional attack,” said Pawel Zalevski, a senior Defense Ministry official.
For General Klisz, the night began as normal. At his command center in Warsaw, he received a report indicating a Russian attack on Ukraine involving more than 400 drones as well as ballistic missiles and other ordnance. Poland’s air defenses were on alert, but nothing indicated that this attack would be any different from the many that came before.
At about 11 p.m., that changed. The Polish soldier, who was at a mobile radar installation deployed at the Belarus border, noticed what General Klisz later described as “this freaking dot,” moving toward the Polish border.
At that point, a number of things had to happen at once, General Klisz said. Fighter jets, in this case F-16s and F-35s, as well as military helicopters, had to get in the air, and ground-based air defenses including advanced Patriot systems had to be readied. General Klisz also had to clear Poland’s airspace to make sure air defense systems did not mistakenly interpret a passenger aircraft as a target.
The operation was different from those that occur almost nightly in Ukraine. There, with hundreds of missiles and drones sent from Russia, the moment something appears in the sky, Ukraine’s military attacks it with gunfire from the ground and the air. Wreckage from drones and spent ordnance often rains down on cities and towns.
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In Poland, a country technically at peace, the operation was more surgical. Before opening fire, protocol dictated that pilots obtained visual confirmation that the objects were hostile. General Klisz explained that he did not want to use multimillion-dollar equipment to shoot down a glider or a balloon, which he said smugglers from Belarus sometimes used to cross the border. He also had to avoid collateral damage.
In the end, he said, he ordered his forces to shoot down only a few drones. Most, he said, were dummies constructed of foam and intended for use in Ukraine to throw off air defenses. The ones shot down, he said, more closely resembled Shahed attack drones, which are made of metal and appear different on radar than the dummies.
The drones shot down had a trajectory indicating they might be headed to the Rzeszow airport, near the Ukraine border, the Polish official with knowledge of the military action said. The airport is heavily protected by air defense systems, including Patriots, because it serves flights delivering foreign armaments destined for the front. The official speculated that Russia had wanted to test the airport’s defenses. In the end, only the Patriot systems’ radars were used, not its missiles, which are more costly than aircraft-fired missiles and would have caused much more damage had they gone awry.
In the aftermath, allies pledged solidarity and NATO launched a military operation, called Eastern Sentry, that will increase air patrols and ground-based interceptor systems.
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After suggesting that the drone incursion might have been an accident, Mr. Trump declared that he would condemn Russia “even for being near that line,” and in earlier talks with Mr. Nawrocki, he raised the possibility of sending additional American troops to Poland.
Mr. Przydacz, a seasoned diplomat, labeled Mr. Trump’s mixed messaging “the poetry of negotiation” and part of the American president’s push to end the war.
“I’m pretty sure that the goal for President Trump is to stop the killing,” he said.
The broader NATO show of support reassured Poles, who have a “traditional trauma of being left alone,” born of the country’s abandonment by its allies Britain and France when the Nazis attacked in 1939, said Janusz Reiter, a former Polish ambassador to the United States and Germany.
NATO’s response showed that at least for the moment, the Russian threat has not split the West, as Mr. Putin perhaps intended, Mr. Reiter said.
“But I’m not naïve,” he added. “I know this could change.”
Tomas Dapkus and Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
Michael Schwirtz is the global intelligence correspondent for The Times based in London.
