The Russian drone violations in Poland should be met with Nato imposing a no-fly zone for Vladimir Putin’s forces over Ukraine, a British military analyst has said.
Sean Bell believes the Western military alliance needs to show some resolve after the country recorded 19 ‘objects’ inside its airspace during an attack on western Ukraine.
Polish and Nato air defences were scrambled during the bombardment of Ukraine overnight which left at least one dead in what Warsaw called a ‘large-scale provocation.’
Drone remains were found in eastern Poland at locations including Czosnówka, Cześniki and Mniszków, the latter around 190 miles from the Polish-Ukrainian border.
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Polish fighter jet pilots shot down the drones ‘that posed a direct threat’, according to the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Bell, a former Air Vice-Marshal, said that Nato should now consider imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine rather than continuing to give Kyiv enough military aid to prolong the three-year-old war without being able to exact an decisive outcome on the battlefield.
He told Metro: ‘Since the beginning of the all-out invasion there have been all sorts of reports of drones flirting with the edge of airspace as they make their way to targets.
‘This appears to be different.
‘Reports suggest they were up to 190 miles inside Polish airspace, closing down Warsaw Airport and the airspace above it.
‘That’s pretty significant and understandably it’s prompted a lot of concern from Poland and Nato.
‘The question is whether it is deliberate by Russia or another mistake.
‘One drone is a mistake, 19 is probably not. If it’s deliberate, one of the frustrations of people like me, an ex-military person, is that military effectiveness is all about deterrence.
‘If your enemy is going to have a go at you he has to believe that he will come off worse; he has to believe the risks involved outweigh the benefits.
‘Therefore every time a shell, missile or drone transgresses your airspace, it weakens the value of deterrence.
‘What you should do is immediately shoot them down and immediately take some kind of retaliatory action because otherwise it compromises the safety of your citizens, that should be the No1 priority for any government.
‘Poland’s robust action to defend itself is welcome, but it’s unlikely that there will be any retaliatory action.’
The former RAF Harrier pilot did not rule out Russian incompetence or indiscriminate targeting of ‘terror weapons’ amid the sheer scale of its ramped-up aerial attacks on Ukraine.
‘The fact is that these are Shahed drones which are slow, relatively ineffective and not difficult to track,’ he said.
‘If you were going to escalate and pick a fight with NATO, Russia could have done it in a much more effective way.
‘We have seen a lot of incompetence from Russia throughout the conflict and one of the things that would lead me down that path is that they are sending up to 1,000 drones a day now into Ukraine.
‘I used to be involved in targeting and identifying and 1,000 targets a day is really difficult to do. You are probably going to be rushing that process.
‘There may be some high value targets and some that are really important, which number maybe double digits but you are going to struggle to get into triple digits. As soon as you are doing more than that you are getting into the realm of terror weapons, so you probably don’t care where they go.
‘You just want them to fly and cause havoc.
‘Another explanation could simply be that the Russian soldiers are entering the wrong data in longitude and latitude.
‘Russia and Iran are not known for their high-tech military equipment and it’s quite possible they had a batch that were wrong.
‘That doesn’t absolve Russia of responsibility, you’re still accountable for where they land.’
The drone violations will drive home to Nato member nations that the war in Ukraine is spilling over their eastern flank at a time when Donald Trump is not showing any inclination to back Kyiv decisively or stick to deadlines given to Russia as part of his attempts to end the war.
Poland shot down the drones with the backing of Nato aircraft – the first time a member of the Western military alliance is known to have fired shots during the all-out attack on Ukraine.
Another possibility for the violations is that Putin is trying to test the West’s resolve and sow cracks among Nato members.
For Bell, it comes back to the same point: deterrence.
‘There shouldn’t be an ambiguity that if it flies it dies, if it goes one centimetre over the border it gets shot,’ he said.
‘There shouldn’t be this tolerance policy, which quite frankly gets abused.
‘A wider point is that in some respects the West’s security rests on Ukraine’s security, because if Ukraine is to fall, Poland comes next.
‘The West is providing enough aid to stop Ukraine losing, but not enough to help it win. With America getting more unreliable, the West has got some harsh choices to make; either it lets Ukraine slowly lose or it ramps up its response options. There are many of us, myself included, who think that now is the time for a no-fly zone to be put in place.
‘There are questions there about how much of Ukraine, what the rules of engagement are. I accept it is a ramping up of risk but it’s only matching what Russia is doing anyway.
‘If Russia is sending drones anywhere near Nato airspace over Ukraine, then that should be a justification for Nato to shoot them down.
‘Therefore this feels like Europe being another step closer to considering a no-fly zone which would ramp up the response from the West’s perspective and would give Russia something to think about.
‘Russia should be blamed because the war has spilled over into Nato countries and therefore Nato has to step in and stop it.’
Mr Tusk said the violation of his country’s airspace was likely a ‘large-scale provocation’ and that Poland is ready to react.
In response, Russian diplomat Andrey Ordash called the accusations ‘groundless’, claiming the drones originated from Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine destroyed more than 380 Russian drones overnight — the majority being shaheds.
Mr Tusk has now formally asked to invoke Nato’s Article 4, which allows member states to ‘consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened’.
The move is considered the starting point for major Nato operations, and once invoked the North Atlantic Council usually meets to formally discuss the potential threat.
Members can then come to a joint decision on how best to act next, including whether to invoke Article 5, which states an armed attack against one member state is considered an attack against them all.
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