Sumantra Maitra
After Russian drones infiltrated Polish airspace on September 9, Radosław Sikorski, Poland's Foreign Minister, told the Guardian, “Interestingly, they were all duds, which suggests to me that Russia tried to test us without starting a war.”
“The drones didn’t reach their targets and there was minor damage to property, nobody was hurt. If it happened in Ukraine, by Ukrainian definitions, that would be regarded as a 100 percent success,” he said.
No one likes speculating about war and peace. The fact is that a bunch of Russian drones went into Polish and Romanian airspace. Three of those over Poland were shot down, the country’s airspace was closed off for a while, and NATO air forces from the UK and Netherlands took part in intercepting Russian drones. Those over Romania turned back, escorted out by the Romanian air force back into Ukraine. There was talk of a NATO–Russia war. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the country was closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War.” When President Donald Trump shrugged on camera and said it might have been a Russian mistake, Tusk instantly replied that it wasn't.
It was unlikely to be a mistake. But it wasn’t necessarily a provocation or a probe. While mistakes are definitely possible with primitive small units—they can be fried or jammed, their batteries can die, weather can affect their propellers or flight, or manual error or GPS or fiber optic cables can affect their flightpath—the enormous units that were used in the incursion over Poland signal sophistication. The fact that these were duds, or decoys, add a level of planning and intrigue on top of that. Expensive Russian drones won’t just hover miles behind the actual zone of conflict to “test” anything. Everyone knows in an actual NATO–Russia war, those drones will be accompanied by intense missile barrages overwhelming the surface missile batteries and air defences. A major NATO–Russia war would not involve any probing or anything at a localized scale; it would be amped up to 11 from the start. The “test” theory falls flat, given that for such a conflict there’s nothing to test.
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