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Poland said the UN security council would hold an emergency meeting over an incursion into the country by Russian drones on Wednesday as allies disputed whether it was a deliberate attack on Poland by Russia and Donald Trump offered little in the way of public support.
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, told local radio Poland planned to use the security council meeting to “draw the world’s attention to this unprecedented Russian drone attack on a member of the UN, EU and Nato”.
He added that Polish authorities had no doubt the act was deliberate. “Nineteen violations of our airspace, several dozen drones identified, a few shot down, the action lasting seven hours, the whole night – so we cannot say it was an accident,” he said.
Sikorski and his Ukrainian and Lithuanian counterparts issued a statement calling the incursion a “deliberate and coordinated attack” and an “unprecedented provocation”.
However, Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s supreme allied commander Europe, said at a briefing on Thursday that it was still unclear whether the incursion was deliberate. “We do not yet know if this was an intentional act or an unintentional act,” he said. He added that he had “low confidence” in Poland’s claims about the number of drones.
“I would not be able to tell you with any confidence today that it was 20 or that it was 10. We just have to get into the technical details to figure that out, to debrief the crews that were up see what they saw,” he said.
Russia has claimed its drones were not targeting Poland, but the defence ministry did not confirm or deny Russian drones were involved. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia would make no further comment on the incident.
As European leaders rushed to condemn the Russian incursion and pledge allied support, the initial response from Trump was ambiguous. “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” he wrote on social media, without condemning the attack.
Late on Wednesday, Poland’s nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, who visited Trump in the White House last week, said that he and Trump had spoken by phone and “confirmed allied unity”, without giving further details.
The US ambassador to Nato, Matthew Whitaker, offered a more reassuring message for Warsaw. “We stand by our Nato allies in the face of these airspace violations and will defend every inch of Nato territory,” he wrote on X.
Since Putin and Trump met in Alaska last month, Russia has continued almost nightly air assaults on Ukraine and there is little sign that a ceasefire or peace deal is on the horizon. Many in Europe see the incursion into Poland as Russia testing the limits of Nato solidarity under Trump. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the incident brought Poland closer to military conflict “than at any time since the second world war”.
On Thursday morning, Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, arrived by train to Kyiv, where he was due to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Stubb has emerged as a key link in the European effort to keep Donald Trump onside in support for Ukraine, due to a warm relationship with the US president.
In Poland, Tusk and Nawrocki addressed troops after the incursion.
Tusk visited an airbase in the city of Łask and praised the air force for its quick response. He said a “great modernisation programme” for Poland’s military forces, already announced, would be even more important after the incursion, and said Poland should receive the first delivery of F-35 fighter jets from the United States next year, part of a package of 32 aircraft in a long-agreed deal.
“We hope that the Americans will meet the deadlines. We would like the first batch of the F-35s to reach you in May, and so that we can speak of our air power with increasing confidence from month to month, and from year to year. And that Poland is truly safe from the sky,” Tusk told the troops.
As a precaution, Poland said it was closing air traffic in the eastern part of the country, close to the borders with Russia and Ukraine, to civil flights until 9 December. The country’s air traffic control agency said the measure was “to assure national security”. Airspace over Ukraine has been closed to civil flights since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, while Ukrainian drone attacks in recent months have regularly forced Russian airports to close.
Poland said some of the drones that entered its airspace came from Belarusian territory, where Russian and local troops are preparing to begin major military exercises on Friday.
