Russian drones and missiles continue to violate NATO airspace, endangering citizens in the eastern regions of the alliance. Experts propose possible reactions.
(DW) In the early hours of last Sunday (08/09), two Romanian F-16 fighter jets took off from an air base in Borcea, a town close to the Ukrainian border. Residents in the area were warned by text alerts.
The emergency response was triggered after Romania’s radar surveillance system tracked a Russian drone entering Romanian airspace. The drone reportedly hovered there for more than 30 minutes and finally returned to Ukraine.
It wasn’t the first incident of its kind in Romania or, in this case, on NATO territory. Just a day earlier, a Russian drone crashed near the Latvian town of Rezekne, probably coming from neighboring Belarus.
The number of such incidents has increased over the last four weeks, with Russia appearing willing to take more risks. “It’s getting worse, and NATO now really needs to come up with an answer,” Jamie Shea, NATO’s former assistant secretary-general for emerging security challenges, told DW.
Shea, a senior fellow at Brussels-based think tank Friends of Europe, argues that the alliance has “to provide more protection for its member states”. The alliance has promised to protect every inch of NATO territory since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Is Russia testing NATO?
The organization has condemned Russia’s recent airspace violations, calling them “irresponsible and potentially dangerous”.
However, in a post on the X social platform, the outgoing deputy secretary-general, Mircea Geoana, stressed that the alliance has no information “indicating an intentional attack by Russia against allies”.
Experts like Jan Kallberg, a fellow at the Washington-based Center of European Policy Analysis, suspect that Russia may be probing NATO’s reaction and seeking to find discrepancies “between what we say and what we do”. They may also be “trying to test the communication capacity of NATO allies”, he told DW.
The issue was among the topics discussed during a closed-door meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels this week. Pressure seems to be growing for NATO to go beyond the measures already in place, including increased surveillance and air patrols and the deployment of more air defense systems in the alliance’s eastern regions.
Should NATO simply shoot down Russian drones?
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said that Poland, as well as other countries bordering Ukraine, have a “duty” to shoot down Russian missiles before they enter their airspace.
In November 2022, two farmers died when a missile – this time a Ukrainian air defense missile – caused an explosion outside the village of Przewodow, about 8 kilometers west of the Ukrainian border.
As a sovereign nation, Poland could certainly do what it deems necessary for its self-defense, but it is unlikely that the Polish government will go ahead without a collective decision from the alliance. So far, NATO has opposed this proposal, saying it risks the alliance becoming part of the conflict.
“The escalation mentality is limiting the ability of NATO countries to help themselves and Ukraine,” says Kristine Berzina, a security policy expert at the German Marshall Fund, a US public policy think tank. She points out that, despite Russia proclaiming “red lines everywhere”, neither the West’s growing support for Ukraine nor Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russian territory in the Kursk region have provoked “any kind of cataclysmic outcome whatsoever”.
Buffer zone on the border with Ukraine?
“Extending Poland’s or Romania’s air defenses over western Ukraine would help Poland not only protect its own citizens, but also Ukrainian cities like Lviv,” Berzina stresses. This would be an important and welcome side effect for Ukraine, as winter is approaching, a time known for a rapid increase in Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Shea, the former NATO officer, also expects the prospect of incidents in NATO airspace to grow as Russia attacks more targets in western Ukraine.
NATO countries neighboring Ukraine
“The real question is: does anyone have to die besides the two Poles, and how much worse does the situation have to get before this kind of problem is addressed?” Shea asks.
But Shea notes that if NATO decides to use its air defense systems on the border with Ukraine within a limited area, “it has to be limited enough” so as not to give the impression that “this is the West’s introduction into the war”.
Even so, “it has to be operationally effective” not only to intercept drones, but also ballistic missiles, before they can cross into NATO territory. According to Shea, a zone of 100 kilometers on Ukrainian territory is probably “the minimum to give it adequate time for reconnaissance, surveillance and interception”.
NATO allies restrained by domestic politics
In the end, it’s certainly a political decision. Experts DW spoke to agree that if NATO wants a buffer zone on the Ukrainian border, it will have the resources to establish it.
But is that likely to happen?
With the upcoming presidential election in the US and difficult domestic politics in France and Germany, governments seem to have little appetite for making decisions that could be criticized for bringing their countries to the brink of war with Russia.
“As long as the Russians aren’t deliberately attacking us, we’ll turn a blind eye,” said former NATO officer Jamie Shea.
“But if there’s a serious incident where a Russian drone crashes into a supermarket in a NATO country,” he adds. “It will be a very different story.”