By ballooning this incident with the Russian drones, NATO’s supporters in Europe and America believe they can force Trump to change course on Ukraine. He shouldn’t.
The same people who have spent the last five years doing everything in their power to get the United States and NATO more directly involved in the ongoing Ukraine War are at it again.
A recent incident involving upwards of 19 suspected Russian drones—specifically Gerbera-type unmanned aerial vehicles—breaching the airspace of NATO member Poland has triggered a cascade of recriminations and accusations. The drone swarm, successfully downed by Polish and Dutch warplanes, did not cause any injuries in Poland and did not last very long in Poland’s well-defended airspace.
For whatever the Kremlin’s word is worth, it has denied intentionally launching the drones at Poland.
Why Would Russia Want to Attack Poland?
Both Poland and the rest of NATO’s leadership, having met after the drone incident under the auspices of a NATO Article IV declaration, determined that for “the first time in history NATO planes have fired on potential threats in allied airspace.”
This comes on the heels of weeks of posturing from key NATO members, like Britain, France, and Germany, all of whom are making noise about increasing their defense spending for the first time in since the end of the Cold War and threatening to deploy their troops to Western Ukraine as “peacekeepers” of some kind.
Hawkish former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who President Donald Trump declined to include in his second administration, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Putin’s tests of Western resolve are growing bolder. We cannot afford a weak response.”
Multiple defense intellectuals have been brought out across Western media outlets and echoed similar talking points. The consensus both from official NATO sources and the defense punditry class is that the Russians deliberately launched the attack at Poland’s borders as a means of testing NATO’s resolve. Of course, the Gerbera drones—which, remember, are notoriously inaccurate—were easily detected and shot down in short order.
Yet what precisely did Moscow have to gain from such an attack? More importantly, what evidence does NATO have that the drones were deliberately deployed into Polish airspace as part of a larger provocation strategy by Russia? In other words, what does the Kremlin have to gain by expanding the war in Europe at this moment?
There is an anxiety today among the NATO class that Ukraine’s loss to Russia—the most likely outcome of the ongoing war—would equate to a military defeat of NATO. Of course, this should never have been the case, and it would not have been the case had NATO avoided entanglement in the war in the first place. But even if Moscow manages to subdue Ukraine, there is little evidence that it intends to trigger a wider regional war against the European defense alliance.
This might seem surprising to some who don’t follow the intricacies of international affairs. Yet Ukraine was never part of NATO, and in spite of vague future promises of a pathway to admission, was not on track to join when Russia invaded in early 2022. With this in mind, it is somewhat strange that NATO has gone as far with supporting Ukraine as it has. NATO was supposed to be a defensive military alliance committed to protecting its neighbors—not intervening in the affairs of its non-NATO neighbors, no matter how morally righteous it might believe them to be.
Thus far, the Russians have largely kept their war in Ukraine confined to the Russian-speaking Eastern portions of the country, which they regard as a natural part of the “Russian world.” Since its abortive and ill-fated attempt to seize Kyiv in February 2022, Russia has refrained from launching an incursion into western Ukraine—instead creating a defensive perimeter around the Crimean Peninsula, Russia’s crown jewel on the Black Sea. As such, it is safe to say that Russia is not interested in expanding the war—and certainly not seeking to wage war directly with NATO.
This Isn’t the First Time Poland Has Been Caught in the Crosshairs
There have been at least two previous moments in the last four years in which it was alleged that Russia attempted to attack Poland during the Ukraine War. The first came in November 2022, when a missile struck Polish territory bordering Ukraine, killing two Polish civilians.
Poland has been, since the start of the war, a key conduit for resources flowing into Ukraine from the rest of NATO. Ukraine’s government immediately asserted that it was a deliberate attack by Russia against Poland aimed at destroying those supply lines emanating out from Poland.
A subsequent investigation by the Polish National Security Bureau determined that the missile was not fired by Russia at Poland. Instead, the missile was an old Soviet system that likely misfired from a Ukrainian S-300 air defense battery. That battery had been activated in defense of Ukrainian territory after Russian warplanes attacked the area of Ukraine the S-300 was tasked with defending. The missile that battery fired at Russian planes went off-course and ended up exploding in nearby Polish territory.
But Kyiv immediately accused Russia and desperately attempted to get NATO to invoke Article V.
Then, last year, the Polish government accused Moscow of launching a missile that entered Polish airspace. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski summoned the Russian embassy’s charges d’affaires in Warsaw for a reprimand. The Russian embassy, however, refused the summons until Sikorski’s office could present evidence proving the missile that breached Polish airspace was, in fact, fired by the Russian Armed Forces fighting in Ukraine. No proof was presented, and the envoy went unsummoned.
Pro-NATO Voices Want to Blow Up the Polish Drone Incident
So what is really going on here?
At least some of NATO’s members in Europe are chomping at the bit to broaden NATO’s involvement in Ukraine. Less than 24 hours after the downing of the Russian drones, virtually every pro-NATO voice in the West has taken to the press and given nearly identical talking points about the alleged Russian attack on Poland.
Even though President Donald Trump has reversed his original campaign promise to “end the Ukraine War on Day One,” the support that Trump has given the Ukrainians has been conditional—and somewhat limited. Earlier this summer, Trump stunned his MAGA supporters when, during a cabinet meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump proclaimed that he was sending more military aid to Ukraine. Still, the number of weapons sent to Ukraine was much smaller than what had been promised to Kyiv. This pattern—overpromising in public, and underdelivering later on—has been a hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine for the last several months.
As Trump insists that his support for Ukraine is unwavering and that he is angry with Russian leader Vladimir Putin for perceived diplomatic slights, the White House has been angling to reduce America’s military commitments to Europe. In fact, the Pentagon just issued a major strategy document indicating that the US military would be deprioritizing Europe, the Middle East, and even the Indo-Pacific in favor of Western hemispheric defense.
All this is sending the European members of NATO into panic mode. Trump is saying one thing to them and then not quite following through on what he said. Everything is conditional, fungible, and transactional with the current White House. Europeans accustomed to the American security umbrella view NATO as a sacrosanct entity and, without the United States being fully committed to NATO, the alliance will wither. And if NATO dies, Europe will be undefended from their bogeyman of Russia.
The Trump Administration Should Not Overreact to the Drone Incident
So, by ballooning this incident with the Russian drones into a grand conspiracy on the part of Putin’s Russia to escalate the war against NATO, NATO’s supporters in Europe and America believe they can force Trump to fully invest in Ukraine’s defense—and in so doing to get Trump to restore the primacy of NATO in US foreign policy.
Therefore, the question of cui bono is best answered as the Europeans, rather than the Russians. After all, the Poles and their NATO allies had no problems in tracking and shooting down all the Russian drones well before they threatened anyone or anything in Poland.
What, precisely, did the Russians gain by putting NATO on alert? If Moscow really wanted to attack Poland or any other part of NATO, they probably would have used far more lethal systems—in far larger numbers—than the 19 Gerbera drones.
As things stand, we don’t yet know for sure what happened in the skies above Poland. What we do know is this is not the first time something like this has happened and, in the previous instances, the incidents were either accidental or not the Kremlin’s fault. It will take weeks and months to know what precisely happened; until an investigation is conducted, the last possible thing America should be doing is jumping to conclusions that lead to a wider war and greater levels of US military commitment.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert is a senior national security editor at The National Interest. Recently, Weichert became the host of The National Security Hour on America Outloud News and iHeartRadio, where he discusses national security policy every Wednesday at 8pm Eastern. He is also a contributor at Popular Mechanics and has consulted regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, The Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / Aleksei Kochev.
