Following Russia’s drone incursion into Poland on Tuesday night, Defence Secretary John Healey says he has instructed our armed forces to provide options to bolster Nato’s air defences there. We have heard similar calls from other Nato countries, including France, Germany and the Netherlands, who have all said they will deploy additional defensive assets. This is exactly the wrong response and plays straight into Russian hands.

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said the incident brought Poland closer to military conflict “than at any time since the second world war”, describing it as a “large-scale provocation”. Others, including Healey and a range of defence experts have said Russia was testing Nato’s response. None of that is true. Putin has no need to test our response to drones entering Nato airspace, because he already knows exactly what it will be: nothing.


Neither was this a probe to assess Warsaw’s air defences with a view to launching a much larger scale attack later on. Nor was it a provocation to lure Nato into a retaliatory attack by hitting targets on its territory. A maximum of 19 drones seem to have entered Polish airspace, nothing like sufficient force to precipitate a significant reaction. Nato itself proved that by saying it did not warrant triggering Article 5: an attack on one is an attack on all. Bear in mind that on the same night, 415 drones and 43 missiles were launched at Ukrainian cities. That is what a large-scale provocation looks like, Mr Tusk.


Yes, this was the most significant air incursion into Nato territory in its history. Yes, it was the first time Nato combat planes have shot down Russian drones – though it’s not the first time in recent memory that a Nato jet has shot down a Russian one. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should let Putin off the hook for this or any other of his aggressions. But rather than resort to ill-considered and reflexive cries of “escalation”, we need to look at what happened in proportion, and above all we need to carefully analyse exactly what Putin really had in mind and how best to counter him. If, as some have suggested, now is finally the time for decisive Nato intervention, fine; but, even if the political will to act existed, which it doesn’t, we should not think about doing so on the basis of flawed understanding.



So if this wasn’t in fact a provocation, escalation or test of reaction, what was it all about?

It was part of the same pattern of action that Russia has been following since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Expecting a blitzkrieg campaign followed by Kyiv’s rapid capitulation, instead Putin has become bogged down in a slow-moving and hugely costly war for more than three years. A major reason for that has been a constant supply of arms and ammunition from the West. Fear of escalation deterred Europe or the US from ever sending sufficient munitions to enable Ukraine to push the Russians out, but so far it has been enough to allow them to hold on. Without these supplies, and despite the Ukrainian forces’ tremendous fighting spirit, skill in battle and their own often miraculous weapons production, Kyiv would have collapsed long before now.

That has led Putin to mount a very effective propaganda effort, along with sabotage, arson, cyber attacks, assassination attempts and intimidation inside Western countries, with the aim of persuading them to reduce or completely stop the flow of armaments. A major part of this political warfare campaign has been designed to threaten European countries with future Russian aggression directly against them, including nuclear sabre-rattling. The intention was to show governments and their voters that their own need for national defences is greater than the imperative to continue arming their Ukrainian ally.

That too was the true purpose of this drone incursion: to instil fear among Nato countries to the extent that they would seek to concentrate greater air defences to protect Poland and consequently deny Ukraine the resources it so badly needs. This, exactly as we have been hearing from our political leaders since Tuesday night. And at this moment, it is air defences that Kyiv requires above all else, with ever more powerful long-range attacks against cities that have now become Putin’s primary strategy to force Ukraine to buckle under to his territorial demands.

So the proper response to Tuesday’s incursion is to do the opposite of what Putin is hoping for. That is not to say that Nato countries shouldn’t be building up their own air defences. They should be, and they should have been doing that for many years. It is an area that has been woefully under-developed throughout the West even as missile and drone potencies have been increasingly acquired by a number of potential adversaries. But given that there are grossly inadequate air defence assets to go round, the overwhelming priority of Nato nations right now should be pouring as many available systems as possible into Ukraine rather than keeping them in reserve for a war that is not at present on the cards.

Of course such a war against the West could occur in the future but it’s not going to come from Putin any time soon. He’s got far too much to occupy him in Ukraine and the last thing he wants is to widen this conflict. That much has been obvious since the start: despite his aggressive anti-Western rhetoric, he has been extremely careful to avoid a direct clash with Nato. The best means to deter any such thing is to deny him the victory he so badly needs now in Ukraine. And the best way to do that is not to husband critical military assets in Western warehouses or even deploy them into the field Poland or elsewhere in Europe, but to build up Kyiv’s fighting power to enable it to resist as strongly as possible.

Not only will that save lives and give Kyiv a stronger position if it is forced to agree terms, but it will also buy valuable time for Nato to boost its own long-neglected defences.