Russia’s Defence Ministry has said in a statement on its English-language Telegram channel that it had “no intentions to engage any targets on the territory of Poland” following the unprecedented violation of NATO airspace carried out by some 19 Russian drones overnight.
The statement issued by the ministry, to which the Kremlin had earlier referred journalists asking about the alleged breach of Polish airspace, was notably mild by the vitriolic standards of the Russian military-industrial complex, and though it stopped short of confirming that its drones had entered Polish territory, it didn’t deny it outright either.
“The maximum flight range of the Russian UAVs used in the strike, which allegedly crossed the border with Poland, does not exceed 700 km,” the statement read somewhat ambiguously, given that a 700km range would still allow the drones to reach eastern Poland from launch sites in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad or its close ally Belarus.
On a final, more conciliatory note, the Defence Ministry added that it was “ready to hold consultations on this subject with the Polish Defence Ministry”.
However, the Russian Foreign Ministry sounded a far more defiant tone, calling the Polish allegations “insinuations aimed at escalating the Ukrainian conflict”, and citing the claims made in the Russian Defence Ministry statement as facts that “completely debunk the myths once again spread by Poland to further escalate the Ukrainian crisis”.
Though a NATO source initially told Reuters the alliance was not treating the incident as an attack but as an intentional incursion, opinion on the incident appeared to harden among NATO member states as the day went on.
The drones that violated Polish airspace were “clearly set on this course” and “did not have to fly this route to reach Ukraine”, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said in comments reported by German daily Die Zeit. “There is absolutely no reason to believe that this was a course correction error or anything of the sort,” Pistorius told the German parliament.
By contrast, when US President Donald Trump joined the conversation on Truth Social on Wednesday afternoon, he sounded singularly unbriefed about the incident, asking simply: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!”