On the day where Poland is sweeping up debris from a huge drone incursion on its territory, John Healey is hosting its defence minister in London.
It’s no last-minute arrangement – the British Defence Secretary has had this meeting of the E5 nations in his diary for a while.
Joining Poland, France, Germany, Italy and the UK is Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s minister of defence.
As you might expect, the chat was due to focus on the situation in Ukraine. But now, a particularly pressing new issue will have been forced onto the agenda.
Overnight, Polish airspace was ‘violated by a huge number of Russian drones’, the country’s President Donald Tusk wrote on X.
The drones that ‘posed a direct threat’ were shot down, he said – confirming what appears to be the first direct engagement of Russian assets by a Nato member state since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A Russian official in Poland has described claims that the drones came from Russia as ‘groundless’.
Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and General Mieczyslaw Bieniek, an advisor to the Polish government on defence, have described the move as a ‘test’ by Putin.
According to Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group think tank, one of the first jobs of the E5 meeting in London today will be determining whether that’s true or if the incursion was somehow unintentional.
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If it’s found to have been deliberate, there may be a limit to the available options due to the challenges of getting US President Donald Trump on board with a strong response.
Aspinall told Metro: ‘The most likely option is a very firm statement and then an escalation of non-military things. I would expect sanctions would be the kind of most likely route.
‘Now, they probably wouldn’t be Nato-led. The UK might announce some, the EU might announce some, and others may also follow suit.’
Sanctions don’t seem to have much of an impact on Russia anymore and such a move would be unlikely to satisfy Poland or Ukraine, she said.
But while there’s a risk of sending Putin the wrong message and damaging Nato’s reputation, officials may decide it’s not worth escalating the conflict – yet.
This morning, Donald Tusk invoked Nato’s Article 4. Unlike the more well-known Article 5, this doesn’t call for a direct response from the military alliance, but rather for discussions about potential responses.
Aspinall says these talks will likely start in the coming days depending on whether the drone incident is deemed to be an intentional attack.
This may be the moment Nato allies, including the UK, must decide exactly how far they’re willing to go at this point and what it would take for them to go further.
Aspinall said: ‘If it was intentional, and then it was followed by three attacks in Poland, then Nato’s response would be different.
‘But at this point in time, I think we’re going to see Russia and Belarus play it off as an accident. We all strongly condemn them and play it down, and then see where it goes from here.
‘We can think, “OK, this was a test, and we’ve done the best that we can in the situation, but we do need to kind of think long-term about what our response is.”‘
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