Read this First<\/a>, the United States has warned Warsaw that Russia is planning an armed provocation on Polish soil, potentially within months. This could take the form of a drone strike on critical infrastructure or a limited cross-border military incursion.<\/p>\nSuch incidents, carried out overtly, could give Poland grounds to invoke Article 5, Nato\u2019s mutual self-defence clause.<\/p>\n
Yet any Russian action would almost certainly be cloaked \u2013 as in the past \u2013 in some scarcely plausible disguise. A drone strike could be blamed on Ukraine or dismissed as an accident. A border incursion could be explained away as a GPS failure or a search-and-rescue mission to retrieve a helicopter that had crashed after inadvertently crossing into Polish airspace.<\/p>\n
The plausible deniability route is not Russia\u2019s only escalation option, defence officials say. Russia could instead simulate air strikes on Poland using zombie missiles, decoy drones or signal spoofing to create ghost tracks on radar screens, forcing the Polish military to activate air defences. The Kremlin would present such a move as a legitimate response to European military support for Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Either scenario would present Nato with its gravest test yet. Moscow\u2019s ideal outcome, according to European officials I speak to, would be to goad one Nato member state into invoking Article 5 only for others, particularly the US, to conclude it had acted prematurely, dealing the already divided alliance a blow from which it never recovers.<\/p>\n
For years, Moscow has waged a hybrid campaign against Europe while provoking what many military experts describe as a tepid response. It is accused of using its drones, spy ships and shadow fleet to map critical military and civilian infrastructure, probe vulnerabilities and test political reflexes.<\/p>\n
European government officials insist they have developed joint responses to counter the threat. Yet many experts argue there remains insufficient collective resolve to establish mechanisms capable of genuinely deterring Russian aggression. Europe\u2019s much-vaunted \u201cdrone wall\u201d will not be fully operational until 2030. According to people I speak to in the European defence sector, that may prove too little, too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia\u2019s hybrid war against Europe appears set to enter its most dangerous stage yet. As reported in today\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[853,10865,9,126,481,1577,4591,1580,518,331],"class_list":["post-16179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-belarus","tag-nato-north-atlantic-treaty-organization","tag-poland","tag-russia","tag-russia-ukraine-war","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-us-content","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}