UK could bolster Nato air power after drone incursion

The Russian defence ministry said today that the drones used in the “alleged” incursion were unable to reach Poland because they only had a range of up to 700kms.

“These specific facts completely debunk the myths that Poland is once again spreading to further escalate the Ukrainian crisis,” the Russian foreign ministry said.

Analysts have pointed out that the range of Shahed drones found in Polish territory is sufficient for them to have been launched from Russia, its Baltic territory of Kaliningrad or through its ally Belarus.

Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, has said it is vital to determine if the incursion by Russian drones into Poland was accidental or a deliberate attack.

Fico, who is a vocal critic of European military support for Ukraine and has said President Putin had been “wrongly demonised” by the West, was the only EU leader to join Putin and President Xi for a military parade in Beijing this month.

He called the incursion a “a serious incident that can lead to far-reaching consequences” and said “it is vitally important to objectively establish whether it was intentional or accidental and under whose control the drones were used”.

Meanwhile Russia said it had not designated targets “for destruction” on Polish territory during the “alleged” incursion.

Poland’s foreign minister has said there is “no doubt” that Russia had deliberately dispatched drones into his country, and claimed that President Putin was “mocking” President Trump with the incursion.

Radoslaw Sikorski also announced that he had spoken to Marco Rubio, the United States secretary of state, and issued a note of protest to the diplomat in charge of the Russian embassy in Warsaw.

Sikorski implied that the Nato consultations that had been convened at Poland’s request this morning were only the beginning of the alliance’s response. “We won’t leave it like this,” he said.

President Trump is expected to hold a telephone call with his Polish counterpart Karol Nawrocki later today, according to a White House official.

The two leaders appear to have struck up a cordial relationship following Nawrocki’s visit to Washington last week.

After their meeting in the Oval Office, Trump offered to send more American troops to Poland “if they want”, adding: “We’re with Poland all the way, and we’ll help Poland protect itself.”

On Wednesday Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said he expected Trump “will want to show that what he said about Polish safety will be backed by actions”.

Although Russia’s defence ministry suggested that its drones did not have the range to fly into Poland, analysts have disputed this.

Shahed-type drones that have previously infringed on Nato territory have a range of more than 1,240 miles without a warhead, or about 620 miles with one. Polish officials have indicated that many of those recovered from Wednesday’s attack were unarmed decoys.

While the defence ministry in Moscow said earlier that the drones involved had a maximum range of 435 miles, this is still within striking distance from Russia. The Ukrainian-Polish border is less than 370 miles from Russia’s Bryansk region, and Lublin about 400 miles.

A flight path over Belarus, where Russian troops are massing for war games that begin on Friday, would also be plausible.

Polish media reported wreckage found in Olesno, about 250 miles from the Ukrainian border, is only 30 miles from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, further underlining doubts over Moscow’s claim.

“We are in a new era of threat”, John Healey, the British defence secretary, said at the E5 meeting in London. He says he has asked UK armed forces to look at options.

He said up until six weeks ago the UK had six Typhoons in Poland, but now has about 300 members of the Armed Forces based there.

“We will do what we can as part of Nato,” he added.

The E5 group was set up in 2024 and is made up of the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Poland. Until July, RAF Typhoons were operating from Poland as part of Nato’s air policing mission — a task shared between the members of the military alliance.

John Healey, the British defence secretary, said he had asked the UK armed forces “to look at options to bolster Nato’s air defence over Poland” after Russian drones were shot down over the eastern European country.

Healey was speaking at the E5 meeting between Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Poland in London on Wednesday afternoon.

The UK had deployed one of its seven Sky Sabre missile systems to Poland but this was pulled out last year and brought back to the UK for maintenance.

Healey may decide to send at least one of these back to Poland although UK resources are stretched. Another option would be to step up Nato’s air policing mission. RAF Typhoons ended their mission in Poland in July. However, Nato could decide to increase the number of aircraft operating in the region.

A former Nato deputy supreme allied commander in Europe has said “action like this must not go unpunished” after the Russian drone attack in Poland.

Adrian Bradshaw, who was in post between 2014-17, told Andrew Neil on Times Radio that Nato must respond “calmly” and with “unity and resolve” as he called for more sanctions.

“The point of the consultations is to do things which lower the tension and lower the potential for a slide into conflict, which none of us want.

“And it’s reasonable to assume that even Mr Putin doesn’t want a conflict between the whole of Nato and Russia, because it would be disastrous for all of us. So we need to bear that in mind, but be seen to act with resolve, and the point is that an action like this must not go unpunished.

He said there “must be action” to deter aggression. “But if we don’t want to escalate in the military domain, then we must do so in the economic, political and diplomatic domains.”

The wreckage of another Russian drone has been discovered in a Polish village more than 250 miles from the border with Ukraine and 140 miles from Belarus, according to local media.

Radio Zet said a farmer in the village of Olesno, near the port of Elblag, had found the remains of a “large, white machine with wings, about the size of a small car” in one of his fields.

It is unclear how the drone penetrated so deep into Polish territory without being intercepted, although Olesno is only 30 miles from the heavily militarised Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast.

Nato’s Article 4, which was invoked today by Poland over Russian drone incursions, commits the alliance’s member states to consult when “in the opinion of any of them, its territorial integrity, political independence or security” has been threatened. Unlike Article 5, it does not trigger Nato’s collective defence pact.

Before today, Article 4 had been invoked seven times, mostly by Turkey, since Nato was founded in 1949. The first time was in 2003, when Turkey asked for assistance from the alliance over potential threats to its security from the Iraq war. Turkey also invoked the article on four other occasions in connection with the war in Syria.

In 2014, Poland invoked Article 4 after Russian troops invaded Crimea. Nato responded by boosting its response force and deploying troops from member states to battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

In 2022, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, as well as the Baltic states, invoked Article 4 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting Nato to establish four more battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The alliance also reinforced its defence and deterrence capabilities in Europe.

Russia has said it was not targeting sites in Poland during an “alleged” overnight drone attack.

“There were no targets planned for destruction on Polish territory,” the Russian defence ministry said.

It also said it was ready to hold talks with defence officials in Warsaw as tensions grow on Nato’s eastern flank.

“The maximum flight range of the Russian UAVs [drones] used in the strike, which allegedly crossed the border with Poland, does not exceed 700km,” the defence ministry said.

It also said it had carried out “massive strikes with long-range precision weapons” against Ukrainian military targets.

The US ambassador to Nato said on Wednesday that Washington stood by its allies after drones violated Poland’s airspace overnight and were countered by Nato air defences.

Echoing an earlier statement from Nato’s secretary-general, Mark Butte, the US envoy to the alliance, Matthew Whitaker, wrote on X: “We stand by our Nato allies in the face of these airspace violations and will defend every inch of Nato territory.”

The Russian drones that violated Polish airspace were “clearly set on this course” and “did not have to fly this route to reach Ukraine”, the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said Wednesday.

He told German parliament: “There is absolutely no reason to believe that this was a course correction error or anything of the sort.”

Sebastian Hille, a German government spokesman, said that Moscow was “testing” Ukraine’s allies with a “very serious” incident.

The incursions “once again shows the threat that we face” and how much Germany and other Nato countries “are being tested by Russia”, Hille said.

By Marc Bennetts

The Kremlin has neither denied nor confirmed that its drones were responsible for the incursion.

“The EU and Nato leadership accuse Russia of provocation on a daily basis, most often without even trying to present any arguments,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said earlier.

But the incursion of drones appears to signal another escalation in the war in Ukraine. The fact that at least 19 Russian drones flew into Polish airspace, and for long enough to be considered a threat, indicates that this was a deliberate move by Moscow or it suffered a massive loss of control over the powerful combat drones.

The incident comes just days after a Russian airstrike hit the main government building in Kyiv for the first time. There may be concerns now in Europe that Putin, reassured of China’s diplomatic and economic backing, will go all-out in his bid to conquer Ukraine and divide Nato.

Western leaders, who are wary of conflict with nuclear-armed Russia, will now have to decide how to respond in the event of more large-scale drone incursions into Poland or other Nato member states. A failure to respond effectively will be viewed in Moscow as a victory for Putin’s bid to weaken Nato as a military alliance.

John Healey, the defence secretary, said on Wednesday that President Putin had taken his aggression to a “new level of hostility” after Nato jets were forced directly to shoot down Russian drones.

In opening remarks before a meeting in London with the E5 group of European nations, he said: “Poland’s direct defensive military action last night is the first of its kind since Putin launched his illegal invasion in 2022.”

He said the Polish defence minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has “rightly headed home to Poland to deal with this attack”.

Healey said the aggression strengthened support for Ukraine, adding: “Russia’s actions are reckless, unprecedented and dangerous. We totally condemn these attacks. It reminds us that a secure Europe needs a strong, sovereign Ukraine.”

The E5 group comprises France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom. Healey added that between them the E5 nations “contribute 60 per cent of Europe’s defence spending in Nato”.

The head of Nato said that German Patriot air defence batteries were involved in neutralising a series of Russian drones that encroached into Polish airspace.

Mark Rutte, the alliance’s secretary general, listed the ground-based missile systems alongside Polish F-16 and Dutch F-35 fighter jets, an Italian early warning aircraft and Nato tanker transport planes.

Germany is believed to have deployed two Patriot batteries, manned by about 200 troops, to guard the military airport and logistics hub at Rzeszow in southeastern Poland, close to the Ukrainian border.

Nato was prepared to repel any future violations of allies’ airspace with its air defences “continually at the ready” across the eastern flank, the alliance’s secretary general said.

Mark Rutte said that the Russian drone incursion on Poland was “not an isolated incident” and told President Putin to “stop violating allied airspace and know that we stand ready, that we are vigilant and that we will defend every inch of Nato territory … including, of course, its airspace”.

This morning, the North Atlantic Council — the alliance’s central political decision-making body — met in Brussels after Warsaw requested Article 4 deliberations.

Rutte said the allies had denounced Russia’s “reckless behaviour” but a full assessment of the incidents had yet to be concluded.

A Russian diplomat has said that the drones that were shot down over Poland entered the country from Ukraine, but stopped short of admitting that Moscow was responsible or blaming Kyiv.

“We know one thing — these drones were flying from the direction of Ukraine,” Russia’s chargé d’affaires in Warsaw, Andrei Ordash, said after leaving the Polish foreign ministry.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, declined to comment, saying the matter was an issue for the Russian defence ministry. Channel One, Russia’s main television station, has not reported on the incident.

Poland’s interior ministry confirmed on Wednesday that a house and a car had been damaged in Russia‘s overnight violation of Polish airspace, adding that seven drones and debris from an unknown projectile had so far been located.

“We have found seven drones and projectile debris … of unknown origin,” Karolina Galecka, an interior ministry spokeswoman, told reporters.

Poland is the closest it has been to open conflict since the Second World War, the country’s prime minister told the Polish parliament.

“I have no reason to claim we’re on the brink of war, but a line has been crossed, and it’s incomparably more dangerous than before,” Donald Tusk said. “This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two.”

Tusk confirmed the shooting down of three Russian drones and added that it was likely a fourth was also downed.

“The fact that these drones, which posed a security threat, were shot down changes the political situation. Therefore, allied consultations took the form of a formal request to activate Article 4 of the Nato treaty,” he said.

The Shahed drone has become the primary weapon of choice in Russia’s air war against Ukraine. In summer 2024, Russia fired about 350 Shaheds at Ukraine a month.

In August, they launched more than 4,000, and more than 800 in one night last weekend. Meaning “witness” or “martyr” in Persian, Iran has developed a whole range of Shahed drones.

The Shahed 136 — or Geran 2 in Russian — has become the most frequently used in the Ukraine war. Russia has begun mass producing them on their own soil.

The plant in Alabuga in the Tatarstan region of Russia, is staffed primarily with migrant labour, some of which is from Africa. Japanese media also reported that the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, is to send 25,000 workers there.

Not everything is made in Russia. The four-cylinder engine is made by a Chinese company, Xiamen Limbach, while the high-tech parts of the drone — the signal generators and converters — are manufactured by the Beijing Microelectronics Technology Institute.

The drone has a range of up to 2,500km, and contains a high-explosive fragmentation warhead estimated to weigh about 50kg.

The Shahed is cheap and comparatively slow, but the sheer volume that Russia is able to launch simultaneously is a challenge to Ukraine’s air defences.

Karol Nawrocki, the Polish president, said he will convene the National Security Council, Poland’s equivalent of the UK’s Cobra crisis committee, within 48 hours to review the unprecedented Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace.

He said the meeting of the National Security Bureau on Wednesday included discussions of Article 4 of the Nato treaty. The prime minister, Donald Tusk, confirmed that Poland has formally requested consultations under Article 4, which allows allies to discuss threats to a member’s territorial integrity or security.

Nawrocki said he learnt of the incursions around 3am and immediately co-ordinated with the head of the National Security Bureau, the defence minister, and senior military commanders. Full reports on the drones’ movements and impact are expected within two days.

“This is the first time Nato aircraft have engaged potential threats in allied airspace,” said a spokesman for Nato’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

Britain has a limited number of assets available to help protect European skies, with aircraft and air defence systems stretched thinly at any one time (Larisa Brown writes).

The UK was not involved in helping Poland to defend its skies against the Russian incursion as its assets had recently been moved away from the region, it is understood.

The UK’s Sky Sabre missile system, previously deployed to Poland as part of measures to beef up security of Nato’s eastern flank, is in the UK undergoing maintenance.

The £250 million medium-range anti-air missile system was first deployed in early 2022, along with about 100 personnel to protect Poland’s airspace and returned last year.

In July this year, RAF Typhoons also returned to the UK after carrying out a four-month deployment as part of a Nato air-policing mission in Malbork, Poland.

This RAF move is not unusual, as Nato allies operate on a rotational basis to ensure the skies are protected at any one time. However, the UK has just seven Sky Sabre systems in service and the demand is high.

Three weeks ago a Russian Shahed-type kamikaze drone, nicknamed the “flying moped” because of its characteristically clanking engine, strayed into Polish airspace and kept going for 60 miles.

It eventually exploded in the village of Osiny, barely 50 miles from Warsaw, the capital, and 25 miles from the Polish air force’s officer academy. The blast damaged several buildings, although no one was hurt. The low-flying aircraft did not appear to have been detected by Polish military radar.

These incursions into Nato airspace are no longer extraordinary. They have affected Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland and even Croatia, more than 400 miles away from Ukraine, often escaping detection until they had already hit the ground.

Read in full: Russia is testing Nato’s mettle

One in three Russians knows someone who has died in the war in Ukraine, according to a poll by the Levada Centre, widely regarded as the country’s most independent pollster.

However, one in two people in the city of Moscow said the war had not affected them or their relatives in any way. Putin has deliberately sought to shield Moscow, Russia’s richest city, from the effects of the war.

The poll also found that 66 per cent of Russians are now in favour of peace talks, an all-time high. At the same time, three out of four people said they supported the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. Some analysts say that polls on support for the invasion are unreliable because it is a crime to openly criticise the war and people are afraid of revealing their true opinions to strangers.

There have been 125,000 verified deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, according to BBC Russia and Mediazona, an opposition website. Meduza, another opposition website, said last week that at least 219,000 Russian soldiers have died since Putin sent tanks into Ukraine in 2022.

Sir Keir Starmer has condemned Russia’s violation of Polish and Nato airspace.

“This morning’s barbaric attack on Ukraine and the egregious and unprecedented violation of Polish and Nato airspace by Russian drones is deeply concerning,” the prime minister said in a statement.

“This was an extremely reckless move by Russia and only serves to remind us of President Putin’s blatant disregard for peace, and the constant bombardment innocent Ukrainians face every day.”

Starmer added that he had been in touch with the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, to reiterate the UK’s support for Poland.

He said: “My sincere thanks go to the Nato and Polish forces who rapidly responded to protect the alliance. With our partners — and through our leadership of the coalition of the willing — we will continue to ramp up the pressure on Putin until there is a just and lasting peace.”

A Russian critic of the Kremlin has said the incursion of Russian drones into Poland was a result of the West’s failure to stand up to Moscow’s campaign of sabotage in Europe.

Leonid Volkov, the former chief of staff to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said: “[President] Putin has long since tested the limits. He knows that there will be no reaction. And so he continues to move upon the path of escalation.

“His calculation is obvious: since he already knows that he will not meet with a severe rebuff, the West’s policy to prevent escalation will follow the other remaining (and wrong) path — the path of concessions and appeasement,” Volkov wrote on Telegram.

Russia is believed to be responsible for a growing number of arson, cyberhacking and other attacks on European infrastructure since Putin sent tanks into Ukraine in 2022.

Poland responded to overnight Russian drone incursions by scrambling both Polish and Nato fighter jets — including F-16s and Dutch F-35s — and putting all air defence and radar systems on maximum alert.

Italian surveillance aircraft and Nato mid-air refuelling planes supported the operation, a Nato source said. Military command co-ordinated efforts to identify and neutralise at least 19 drones, deploying weapons against those posing direct threats. Several airports, including Warsaw Chopin, were temporarily closed.

A recently acquired Saab 340 AEW&C early-warning aircraft, described as a “small Awacs” (Airborne Warning and Control System), was also scrambled, marking the first aircraft of this type in Poland.

Poland’s layered air defence combines long, medium and short-range systems with networked 360-degree radar coverage, including US-supplied equipment, to detect and track airborne threats.

Repeated violations of Polish airspace have increased political pressure on the government, with criticism over preparedness and Nato readiness.

The US general in charge of Nato’s forces in Europe said the rapid mobilisation of air support for Poland had been a display of “resolve to defend allied territory”.

Polish air defences were supported by Nato aircraft from Italy and the Netherlands, with public tracking data suggesting that an Italian early warning aerial surveillance jet had been scrambled from a base in Estonia.

General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, said the alliance had responded “quickly and decisively” and its central military headquarters remained in “close contact and co-ordination” with Poland.

Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, said his country’s military recorded 19 airspace violations overnight.

“Nineteen violations were identified and precisely tracked … At the moment we have confirmation that three drones were shot down … We have no information suggesting that anyone was injured or died as a result of the Russian action,” Tusk told parliament on Wednesday.

Tusk added that a significant number of the drones flew into the country from Belarus.

The last drone to be shot down was at 6.45am local time, said Tusk.

The Polish prime minister, has now confirmed that he has invoked Nato’s Article 4 for urgent talks after Russian drones violated his country’s airspace.

“The allied consultations I am referring to have now taken the form of a formal request to invoke Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty,” Donald Tusk told parliament.

The European Union’s chief diplomat has said the Russian drone incursion into Poland appears to have been “intentional, not accidental”.

Kaja Kallas, the head of the bloc’s foreign service and one of its most hawkish voices on Russian aggression, also announced that Brussels would start providing support for border defence programmes such as Poland’s €2 billion “East Shield” fortifications.

“Last night in Poland, we saw the most serious European airspace violation by Russia since the war began, and indications suggest it was intentional, not accidental,” Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, wrote on X.

She added: “We must raise the cost on Moscow, strengthen support for Ukraine, and invest in Europe’s defence. The EU plays a major role and we will support initiatives like the [Polish] Eastern Border Shield defence line.”

A senior MP from the ruling Christian Democratic Union party in Germany has called on Berlin to provide Ukraine with long-range Taurus cruise missiles and “massive military support” in response to the Russian aerial incursion on Poland.

Roderich Kiesewetter, a retired colonel who previously served on Germany’s general staff, said allied declarations of solidarity with Warsaw were “out of place” and inadequate.

“[We must] finally answer with consistency and toughness!” he wrote on X. “The claptrap about peace talks must stop.

“Ukraine must now get Taurus and massive mil[itary] aid, because Russia feeds on our weakness … Our peace, liberty and self-determination are being tested by Russia and are in massive danger.”

Nato is not treating the drone incursion into Polish territory as an attack, an alliance source told Reuters on Wednesday, adding initial indications suggested an intentional incursion of six to ten Russian drones.

Pro-war bloggers in Russia picked up on this report and mocked it.

“Nobody is going to fight for Ukraine,” wrote Yuri Podolyak on Telegram. “Nato does not need [to fight] a war with its own hands.”

Residents in Wyryki, a small village in eastern Poland, heard noises throughout the night — including the whistling of drones and aircraft — before a house in the village was hit.

One of the drones destroyed the roof and shattered bricks of the house in the village, northeast of Lublin. Pictures of what appeared to be a living room showed it covered by rubble and dust, with a large hole punched through the ceiling.

The local mayor, Bernard Blaszczuk, confirmed no one was injured, but said the family who lived there were in shock and were receiving psychological support. Tarpaulins are being ordered to cover the damaged roof.

Classes have been cancelled at two local schools on Wednesday. The largest number of drone reports in Lublin province early on Wednesday came from the counties of Zamosc, Wlodawa and Biala, close to the borders with Ukraine and Belarus.

The Kremlin has yet to comment on the downing of Russian drones over Poland, while state television in Moscow made no mention of the incident. Channel One, Russia’s biggest TV station, said only that Russia had carried out “massive strikes against military infrastructure” in Ukraine.

The Interfax news agency in Moscow reported that drones had been shot down over Poland, but did not say who they belonged to.

Karol Nawrocki, the president of Poland, said the country’s national security committee had raised the prospect of invoking Article 4 of the Nato treaty, which would trigger consultations on a joint alliance-wide response.

General Wieslaw Kukula, the chief of the Polish general staff, is expected to present the government with a list of possible countermeasures within 48 hours.

Meanwhile, Stanislaw Koziej, a former head of the National Security Bureau, said Poland should urge allies to set up a “forward defence zone” over Ukrainian territory as a buffer against future Russian incursions.

Russia’s ally Belarus claimed that it had shot down some drones that went astray due to electronic jamming during an exchange of strikes between Russia and Ukraine.

It added that it had also informed Poland and Lithuania that drones were approaching their airspace.

“This allowed the Polish side to respond promptly to the actions of the drones by scrambling their forces on duty,” the head of the Belarusian military, Major General Pavel Muraveiko, said in a statement in English.

Muraveiko did not say whose drones — also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — went astray.

“During the night-time exchange of strikes by UAVs between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the air defence forces and assets of the Republic of Belarus on duty continuously tracked UAVs that had lost their track as a result of the impact of the parties’ electronic warfare assets.

“Some of the lost drones were destroyed by our country’s air defence forces over the territory of the republic.”

Europe stands in full solidarity with Poland after last night’s incursions by Russian drones, the president of the European Commission has said.

Speaking in her annual state of the union address to the European parliament, Ursula von der Leyen said: “We have witnessed a thoughtless and unprecedented violation of the airspace of Poland and Europe. Europe fully stands in solidarity with Poland. Europe must fight for its place in a world in which many powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.”

Roberta Metsola, the European parliament’s president, added: “We are awaiting information on what happened. Poland has the full right to defend itself.”

Finland and Sweden have declared full support for Poland’s decision to eliminate the Russian drones in its airspace and condemned the Kremlin for the “escalatory” step.

Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, said the incident had underlined how the intense Russian aerial bombardment of Ukraine affected “the security of all of Europe”.

“Russia bears responsibility for this act,” Stubb wrote on X. “Instead of peace, Russia is seeking escalation.”

Romania’s military also scrambled F-16 fighter jets to monitor Russian drones that came close to its borders early this morning, although its airspace was not breached.

Two Romanian air force jets took off just before 1am local time on a reconnaissance mission, after a group of aerial drones were spotted in the area of ​​the Ukrainian town of Vylkove, which is near the border with Romania.

An alert was raised for the northern part of the country, which is a Nato member state. However, by 2.35am the alert was lifted and the jets returned to base.

“No intrusions of any aerial vehicles into the national airspace were detected,” the Romanian defence ministry said on Wednesday.

“The Ministry of National Defence permanently maintains a high level of vigilance and ensures strict surveillance of the national air, maritime and land space,” it added. “We are in permanent contact with our allies, exchange operational information in real time and act firmly to guarantee the security of Romania and Nato’s eastern flank.”

Poland’s defence minister, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, was in London when Russian drones repeatedly violated Nato airspace over Poland last night.

He had attended a working dinner with Ministry of Defence officials — including his British counterpart, John Healey — which was delayed by Transport for London strikes. Kosiniak-Kamysz was scheduled to appear today at the Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair at Excel London.

By 3am, Kosiniak-Kamysz, who also serves as deputy prime minister, was called back to Warsaw. This morning, he attended an emergency cabinet meeting called by the prime minister, Donald Tusk, which began with debriefs from generals and senior security officials.

After accusing Russia of “deliberately targeting” neighbouring Poland, President Zelensky repeated his call for a joint air defence system between Ukraine and its European allies.

“Ukraine has long proposed to its partners the creation of a joint air defence system to ensure the guaranteed downing of ‘Shaheds’, other drones, and missiles through the combined strength of our combat aviation and air defences,” Zelensky said on X. “Together, Europeans are always stronger.”

While Kyiv’s allies have previously donated air defence systems to Ukraine, development of any shared system has been hindered by concerns that it could escalate the war.

President Macron of France has called the incursion of drones into Polish airspace “simply unacceptable.”

He added that he would speak soon to the Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte.

“We will not compromise on the safety of our allies,” Macron wrote in a post on X.

Hours earlier, Macron announced Sébastien Lecornu, the former defence minister, as France’s new prime minister, while activists started a day of protests across the country.

A senior diplomatic source in Poland told The Times that there were “serious worries about the massive incursion”, which amounted to the biggest violation of Polish airspace by Russia since the war began.

They said Russia was “testing Nato” and also “using the political space that [President] Trump is giving to [President] Putin”.

“Russia wants to show with its massive attacks on Ukraine and this hybrid warfare that they have the upper hand,” they added.

Polish media have published pictures of the damage caused when a house was hit by a Russian drone, ten miles from the border with Belarus.

Polsat, a Polish private broadcaster, published images showing a roof that had been torn open on a residential building in Wyryki-Wola, a village close to the point where the Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian frontiers meet.

Police earlier said no one had been hurt.

The remains of another crashed drone were discovered in a field near Czosnowka, a village about 30 miles north of Wyryki-Wola.

The Polish authorities have also announced that the Mazovia region around Warsaw was affected by air alerts, as residents were urged to take shelter.

Nato air defences helped counter drones that entered Polish airspace overnight and the secretary-general Mark Rutte is in contact with Warsaw, an alliance spokeswoman confirmed on Wednesday.

“Numerous drones entered Polish airspace overnight and were met with Polish and Nato air defences. The Nato secretary-general is in touch with Polish leadership and Nato is consulting closely with Poland,” Allison Hart, the Nato spokeswoman and director of the Office of Strategic Communications, wrote on X.

Hart said Nato ambassadors were holding a regular meeting Wednesday morning and “will discuss how Nato responded to the drones that entered Poland overnight”.

Russia’s drone incursions into Polish airspace are more proof that Moscow’s war against Ukraine is a threat to “us all” and Nato should reinforce air defence on the front line without delay, the Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavsky, said on Wednesday.

“[President] Putin will not stop unless we stop him hand in hand with tougher sanctions,” Lipavsky said in a post on X.

Poland is considering invoking invoked Nato’s Article 4 clause to trigger consultations with its allies, The Times has been told.

The mechanism is the standard starting point for large-scale Nato operations but stops short of the better-known Article 5, which provides for mutual defence if a member state is attacked.

Article 4 has previously been activated seven times in Nato’s 76-year history, all of them in the 21st century.

Any member state can use it to initiate alliance-wide talks in response to a threat to its security or territorial integrity.

Poland and other European Nato members have used it twice to prompt consultations on how the alliance should respond to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. On the other five occasions, Article 4 was invoked by Turkey.

Russia deliberately sent drones into Polish airspace to test whether the Nato member was willing and able to take them down, a senior Polish general has said.

Mieczyslaw Bieniek, an adviser to the defence minister, said Moscow appeared to have been probing Poland’s defences and to have sent over a wave of “decoy” drones rather than aiming for particular strategic targets.

On Monday a drone was found to have crash-landed on the Polish side of the border with Belarus, prompting Warsaw to announce that it would eliminate any further incursions it detected, regardless of how many there were.

“This is a deliberate test of an allied country’s air defence system: to check whether this system is operational, whether the early warning system is activated, and whether the electronic warfare and fire control teams are ready,” Bieniek told TVN24, a Polish broadcaster.

President Zelensky said Russia launched about 415 drones and more than 40 cruise and ballistic missiles in what he called a “massive” attack on Ukraine overnight.

At least one person had been killed and others injured in the latest wave of attacks, he said.

“Rescuers are now working in Volochysk, Khmelnytskyi region, where the Russians struck an ordinary sewing workshop with a missile,” he added. “As of now, three people are reported injured … Fifteen of our regions were under attack. Sadly, one person was killed as a result of shelling in the Zhytomyr region.”

On Tuesday, a Russian glide bomb strike killed 24 people as they were waiting for pension payments in a front-line town of eastern Ukraine.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, has said that a “huge number” of Russian drones violated Polish airspace.

“Those drones that posed a direct threat were shot down. I am in constant communication with the secretary-general of Nato and our allies,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky repeated his calls for a strong new response to Putin’s aggression.

In recent days both President Trump and the European Union have suggested new sanctions could be imposed on Russia.

But Zelensky said that the deliberations on sanctions had gone on “far too long” and a “strong response is needed”.

“Whether there will be further steps [from Russia] depends entirely on the coordination and strength of the response. The Russians must feel the consequences. Russia must feel that the war cannot be expanded and will have to be ended,” he wrote on X.

President Zelensky said Russia sent at least eight drones to attack Poland, setting an extremely dangerous precedent for Europe.

“Moscow always pushes the boundaries of what is possible, and if it does not encounter a strong reaction, it remains at the new level of escalation,” Zelensky wrote on X.

“Today there was another step of escalation — Russian-Iranian “Shaheds” operated in the airspace of Poland, in Nato airspace. It was not just one “Shahed” that could be called an accident, but at least eight strike drones aimed toward Poland.”

Shahed drones are a symbol of President Putin’s autocrat diplomacy — Iranian design, North Korean cheap labour, Chinese computer chips and Russian firepower working together in one metal shell to rain death (Jack Clover writes from Kyiv).

While cheap, these drones are not unsophisticated. In recent months the accuracy with which they can be piloted remotely has only improved.

Last night, the drones not only crossed into a Nato member’s airspace, they kept going.

This was not one or two shoddily made aircraft, with little autonomy or direction, getting lost and skirting the border of a third country. The drones went deep into Polish territory, causing Warsaw’s airport to temporarily close. This appears to be a deliberate challenge to the collective West.

Ukrainian targets in Lviv, Vinnytsia, Lutsk and other targets were also attacked last night.

But judging from the number of drones that crossed the border into Poland, the fact that they did not circle or return, can only suggest that the Nato member was also on Russia’s “list of targets” — whatever the Kremlin may say today.

The incursions into Polish airspace occurred as Russia and its ally Belarus are preparing to hold joint war games and while Nato was planning to hold its own military exercises in Poland in response.

An estimated 30,000 soldiers are expected to take part in Nato’s response to the Russo-Belarusian Zapad-2025 (West-2025) drills, which are set to take place September 12-16.

According to the Polish premier, the Zapad war games are designed to stimulate the occupation of the “Suwalki Corridor”, which stretches along the border between Poland and Lithuania, flanked by Belarus and the Russian exclave city of Kaliningrad.

The corridor is often considered a “fragile spot” for Nato and could potentially be the first target of a hypothetical Russian attack.

Lithuania had closed its own airspace along parts of its border with Belarus at the end of August after military drones violated its airspace twice in the previous month, and due to the scheduled Russian-Belarusian exercises.

Poland has restored air operations at airports in Warsaw, Modlin, and Rzeszow, while the airport in Lublin remains temporarily closed, a spokesman for the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency told the television station TVN24.

The airspace was previously closed due to military actions by Polish and Nato jets, but these operations have now ended, according to the army’s operational command.

A Russian suicide drone also struck a house in Wyryki near the Ukraine-Belarus border — the first confirmed attack on Polish soil since the war in Ukraine began.

There were no casualties, according to Polish media.

Any Russian drones that posed a threat after they entered Polish airspace were shot down, according to the country’s military.

Searches are under way to find the wreckage of those that were destroyed.

Police said one damaged Russian drone has been found in the village of Czosnowka, about 25 miles from the border with Belarus.

Dick Durbin, a Democrat senator, said repeated violations of Nato airspace by Russian drones were a sign that “Vladimir Putin is testing our resolve to protect Poland and the Baltic nations”.

“After the carnage Putin continues to visit on Ukraine, these incursions cannot be ignored,” he wrote on X.

Poland has been on high alert for violations of its airspace since a stray Ukrainian missile struck a southern Polish village in November 2022, killing two people.

However, until now, there have been no reports of Polish or allied defence systems destroying drones.

In the US, the Republican representative Joe Wilson, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Russia was “attacking Nato ally Poland” with drones, calling it an “act of war” in a post on X.

“We are grateful to Nato allies for their swift response to war criminal Putin’s continued unprovoked aggression against free and productive nations,” he added.

Wilson urged President Trump to respond with sanctions “that will bankrupt the Russian war machine”.

“Putin is no longer content just losing in Ukraine while bombing mothers and babies, he is now directly testing our resolve in Nato territory,” he added.

Telegram channels dedicated to Ukrainian air defence estimate that about ten Russian Shahed drones flew into Poland, although the exact number is unconfirmed.

The drones did not skirt the border only to return to Ukrainian targets as has happened in the past, they went deep into Polish territory, affecting flights at airports.

The most recent crossed the Polish border at about 7.30am Kyiv time (5am BST) according to one channel called Operativnyi Inform. A second channel, PPO Radar/monitor war, released a map showing the course of the drones, focused on areas of western Ukraine.

The informal social media channels, often managed by anonymous air defence volunteers, advise Ukrainians when to seek shelter.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, convened an emergency meeting of his cabinet to discuss the unprecedented incursions into its airspace.

Poland has informed the Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte, about actions the country has taken, Tusk said earlier.

Ukraine’s foreign minister has said Russian drones flying into Poland during an attack on Ukraine showed President Putin’s impunity and his expansion of the war.

“Putin just keeps escalating, expanding his war, and testing the West,” Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on Wednesday.

“This situation shows that finally the decision needs to be taken to enable partner air defence capabilities in neighbouring countries to be used to intercept drones and missiles in the Ukrainian air space, including those approaching Nato borders.”

The drone incursions disrupted commercial flights at four airports, including Chopin airport in Warsaw and Rzeszow-Jasionka airport in Poland’s southeast, a hub for arms transfers to Ukraine, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration.

There was no official confirmation from Polish authorities that any airports had been closed.

Warsaw Chopin airport said the airspace above the airport had reopened, but for passengers to expect delays throughout the day.

Earlier, it said that while it remained open, “no flight operations are currently taking place”.

“Due to the actions of state services and the military to ensure safety, the airspace over part of the country, including over Chopin airport, has been temporarily closed,” the airport wrote on X.

Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, the Polish defence minister, said Poland was in “constant contact with Nato command” and that aircraft had “used weapons against hostile objects”.

The Territorial Defence Force have been activated for ground searches of downed drones,” he wrote on X.

Poland mobilised its own and Nato air defences to shoot down drones that entered its airspace on Wednesday in what it called an “act of aggression” by Russia.

Poland’s military command said Polish airspace was repeatedly violated by “drone-type objects” during the Russian attack across the border in Ukraine.

“An operation is under way aimed at identifying and neutralising these objects … weapons have been used, and service personnel are carrying out actions to locate the downed objects,” it said in a statement.

“This is an act of aggression that posed a real threat to the safety of our citizens,” the Operational Command of the Polish armed forces said on X.

This is the first time in the Ukraine war that Warsaw has engaged assets in its airspace. The military operation is ongoing.