Chris

That’s the Kremlin line of course, and is being disseminated by their sock puppets in Belarus this morning.

In reality, the track of all drones emanating from Russia is followed and recorded carefully. In this case, we know that a dozen or more violated Polish airspace, but none violated Hungarian or Slovakian airspace (coincidentally, Europe’s two big Russia cheerleaders); furthermore none showed any sign of going off course within Belarus, which is frequently used for overflight by Russian munitions.

The scale and nature of the incursion is far too great to be anything other than deliberate. It’s likely to have been calibrated to look small enough for them to say it was accidental with a straight face, but large enough to force NATO’s defences into action. Be in no doubt this was a probing attack intended to see exactly how far Nato can be pushed and what it will do when its hand is forced. The fact that Nato seems only to have shot at drones they were reasonably certain would come down within Poland (and not veer back into Ukraine after a brief incursion, as happens from time to time), tells Putin that somehow, more than 3 years into the Ukraine war, Nato is still not prepared to take any active, direct action to shoot down something intended to explode inside Ukraine, even while it’s over Nato airspace.

Nato has not come out of this smelling of roses.

---------- Post added at 12:18 ---------- Previous post was at 11:56 ----------

Russia’s diplomatic representative in Poland now saying no evidence has been presented for the Russian origin of the drones.

As per the playbook, they throw multiple, contradictory, contrary statements into the public domain. Having everyone else argue endlessly about what actually happened is the actual point.