A Polish soldier, on watch late one night last week, was monitoring the ongoing bombardment of neighboring Ukraine when an unusual blip appeared on his radar. Its trajectory was unlike the hundreds of other Russian drones filling the night sky; this one was heading straight for Poland—straight for home.
This solitary blip triggered an immediate call to his commanders, setting in motion a military operation unseen in Europe for 80 years. Air raid alarms blared across the region, and fighter jets scrambled into the sky. From his Warsaw command post, Lt. Gen. Maciej Klisz marshaled a multinational NATO force of Polish, German, Italian, and Dutch soldiers. He held his breath, waiting for visual confirmation that the objects were indeed Russian drones pushing into alliance airspace. Then, the order to fire was given.
“There was no change to the course, so I said to my team, ‘Team, are you ready to rock ‘n’ roll?’” General Klisz recounted, describing the dramatic mission he oversaw.
This drone incursion marks one of the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive actions by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, targeting NATO countries with sabotage, murder, and now direct military provocation. Just days prior, Russian fighter jets violated Estonia’s airspace for an unusually long 12 minutes.
Officials and experts across Poland and other allied nations agree: the objective was to test the boundaries of Western resolve, expose vulnerabilities, and lay the groundwork for potential future confrontations.
“That’s the strategy of Putin’s Russia,” stated Marcin Przydacz, a senior foreign policy adviser to Polish President Karol Nawrocki. “If they are not stopped by someone who is strong enough or stronger than them, they always move forward.”
This incident marked the first time since World War II that Polish armed forces were mobilized to defend their homeland from an aerial threat, and the first time since NATO’s inception that allied forces actively engaged an enemy in its airspace.
Mr. Putin capitalized on a moment of global instability, where ongoing wars, deep partisan divides, and an unpredictable U.S. president have created cracks in the security architecture designed to shield the West from global dangers.
In Poland, a government often divided by partisanship spoke with a unified voice, a sentiment echoed by leaders across major European nations. After an initially ambiguous statement, President Trump eventually aligned, at least rhetorically, with other Western leaders in condemning the drone intrusion into Poland as unacceptable.
NATO forces successfully neutralized the threat, which, upon closer inspection, proved less formidable than it first appeared on radar. Over 20 drones entered Polish airspace; most were foam dummies that simply ran out of fuel and drifted to the ground. However, Polish officials confirmed that three armed, Shahed-style drones, similar to those that terrorize Ukraine nightly, were shot down.
No fatalities were reported. A house in eastern Poland sustained damage, not from Russian drones, but from a missile fired by a NATO aircraft, according to an anonymous Polish official familiar with the incident. Amusingly, a rabbit hutch was struck by one of the dummy drones, but the animals survived unscathed.
As has been their custom, Russian officials denied and obfuscated. The Kremlin’s allies in neighboring Belarus suggested the drones might have veered off course due to electronic warfare. The Russian Defense Ministry flatly denied possessing drones capable of reaching Poland. On social media, bots and Kremlin-aligned proxies aggressively promoted a counter-narrative, implying Ukraine orchestrated the drone launches as a ruse to draw Poland further into the conflict.
Polish officials, however, maintained unwavering certainty that Russia deliberately sent the drones. They confirmed the drones were launched from Russian territory, near the border with Ukraine and Belarus. They followed a consistent path over a forested area of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, well away from any legitimate military targets in Ukraine. These drones, while carrying no munitions, had been modified with larger or additional fuel tanks to cover the extended distance, officials explained.
“We have no doubt that this was an intentional incursion and I would say an intentional attack,” asserted Pawel Zalewski, a senior Defense Ministry official.
For General Klisz, the evening had begun routinely. At his Warsaw command center, he received reports of a large-scale Russian attack on Ukraine, involving over 400 drones, ballistic missiles, and other ordnance. Poland’s air defenses were on high alert, but initially, nothing suggested this attack would differ from the many that preceded it.
Around 11 p.m., everything changed. The Polish soldier at a mobile radar installation near the Belarus border spotted what General Klisz later dubbed “this freaking dot,” moving ominously toward the Polish frontier.
At that critical moment, several coordinated actions were required, General Klisz explained. Fighter jets, including F-16s and F-35s, along with military helicopters, had to be airborne. Ground-based air defenses, such as advanced Patriot systems, needed to be activated. General Klisz also had the crucial task of clearing Poland’s airspace to prevent any misidentification of civilian aircraft as hostile targets.
This operation contrasted sharply with the nightly responses in Ukraine. There, facing hundreds of incoming missiles and drones, Ukraine’s military immediately engages every airborne object with ground fire and aerial attacks, often resulting in wreckage raining down on cities and towns.
In Poland, a nation technically at peace, the response was far more precise. Before opening fire, strict protocol demanded pilots achieve visual confirmation of hostile objects. General Klisz emphasized that he was unwilling to expend multi-million-dollar equipment on a glider or balloon, which he noted smugglers from Belarus sometimes used to cross the border. Avoiding collateral damage was also a top priority.
Ultimately, General Klisz stated, he ordered his forces to shoot down only a handful of drones. Most of the encroaching objects, he revealed, were foam dummies designed to confuse air defenses in Ukraine. The drones that were targeted and destroyed more closely resembled actual Shahed attack drones, which are constructed of metal and present a distinct radar signature compared to the decoys.
The trajectory of the intercepted drones suggested they might have been heading for Rzeszow airport, located near the Ukrainian border. This airport is heavily protected by advanced air defense systems, including Patriots, as it serves as a vital hub for delivering foreign armaments to the front lines. The Polish official familiar with the military action speculated that Russia’s intent was to test these formidable defenses. In the end, only the Patriot systems’ radars were activated; their highly expensive missiles, which would have caused significantly more damage had they misfired, remained unused.
In the wake of the incident, allies quickly pledged solidarity, and NATO initiated Operation Eastern Sentry, a military initiative designed to bolster air patrols and deploy additional ground-based interceptor systems.
After initially hinting that the drone incursion might have been an accident, Mr. Trump publicly declared he would condemn Russia “even for being near that line.” In previous discussions with Mr. Nawrocki, he had also floated the possibility of sending more American troops to Poland.
Mr. Przydacz, a seasoned diplomat, characterized Mr. Trump’s seemingly mixed messages as “the poetry of negotiation,” part of the American president’s broader effort to end the war.
“I’m pretty sure that the goal for President Trump is to stop the killing,” he commented.
The broad display of NATO support offered reassurance to Poles, who carry a “traditional trauma of being left alone,” a sentiment rooted in the abandonment by their allies, Britain and France, when the Nazis invaded in 1939, noted Janusz Reiter, a former Polish ambassador to the United States and Germany.
NATO’s decisive response demonstrated that, at least for now, the Russian threat had not succeeded in fracturing Western unity, as Mr. Putin might have intended, Mr. Reiter observed.
“But I’m not naïve,” he concluded. “I know this could change.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a Polish Defense Ministry official. He is Pawel Zalewski, not Zalevski.
Michael Schwirtz is the global intelligence correspondent for The Times based in London. Tomas Dapkus and Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.