Written by : Sarah Noureddine
Edited by: Kendall Fagan
Sirens sounded over eastern Poland before dawn on 9 September 2025. Radar screens lit up with fast-moving dots: nearly two dozen Russian drones had breached NATO airspace. Within minutes, Polish and allied jets scrambled to intercept. One crashed into a farmhouse near Wyryki-Wola, prompting Warsaw to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty. Three days later, the alliance launched Operation Eastern Sentry to reinforce air policing along its borders.
The incident was followed by drone overflights of Romania and the Baltics and temporary airport closures in Scandinavia. What once appeared accidental now reveals a deliberate campaign of pressure and psychological signaling, designed to challenge NATO’s cohesion while staying below the threshold of open conflict. As historian Sergey Radchenko observes, “both sides engage in operations intended to test the other’s resolve,” yet in this contest, credibility rather than firepower defines deterrence
Russia’s use of drones fits this strategy of calibrated coercion. Cheap, expendable, and easily denied, they provide Moscow with tools to observe NATO’s reaction times and expose procedural weaknesses without risking escalation. Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Gordon B. “Skip” Davis, a former NATO official, explains that such incursions function as real-time assessments of the alliance’s thresholds for action and coordination. Rather than isolated provocations, these flights establish a rhythm of low-cost confrontation that slowly erodes the sanctity of European airspace.
The implications are both strategic and legal. Under the 1944 Chicago Convention, any unauthorized entry into a member state’s airspace constitutes a breach of sovereignty, regardless of payload or intent. Each violation thus normalizes an erosion of international law, allowing Moscow to accumulate pressure without crossing a formal red line.
Investigations later revealed that several drones flying over Poland were headed toward Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, a major NATO logistics hub, a clear act of intimidation. Each €10 000 plywood drone compels a defensive response worth millions in sorties and interceptors, exposing what defense specialists call the “economy of imbalance.” As analyst Thomas Withington notes, such asymmetry reveals “the cracks in Europe’s defenses”: how inexpensive autonomy can drain costly deterrence. Every probe that avoids escalation paradoxically heightens the risk of it.
European governments are adapting, but their response highlights a broader transformation in how deterrence is conceived. The European Commission’s proposed “drone wall”, developed with Ukrainian technology, reflects both urgency and dependence: Europe is turning to Ukraine’s rapidly evolving drone industry to modernize its defenses. What began as an emergency measure to protect airspace has become a symbol of technological interdependence, linking security to innovation and data-sharing rather than to traditional arsenals.
This collaboration points to a quieter lesson of the recent incursions. Deterrence in Europe now rests as much on the capacity to innovate and integrate as on the ability to deploy force. As Ukraine’s battlefield experience reshapes Western defense thinking, NATO’s credibility will hinge on how effectively it can translate that agility into its own systems. Stability, in this sense, depends not on escalation but on adaptation, on the willingness to learn, invest, and evolve alongside the technologies that are redefining the boundaries of conflict.