Russia's western neighbors, Europe, and NATO have been waiting for this for a long time: the moment when Russian President Vladimir Putin goes beyond Ukraine, attacks an allied country, and tests the consistency of the Western alliance. It could happen with a more or less covert attack on one of the Baltic states. Or with an airstrike on a country like Poland. Would the allies respond in defense of the attacked country? Or, to avoid an escalation of the war, would they temporize with Moscow and abandon the principle of mutual defense?
The “attack or provocation,” in the words of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, when Russia launched 19 drones into Polish airspace, is not the first Russian air incursion into the skies of a European Union and NATO country. It won’t be the last. NATO isn’t even sure the incursion was intentional. But it is the most tense episode between Europeans and Russians in decades, “a situation that brings [Poland] closer to open conflict, closer than at any time since World War II,” according to Tusk.
The Atlantic Alliance exists because of its Article 5, which states that an attack against one member will be considered an attack against all the others. Since his first term in 2017, Trump has cast doubt on the validity of this principle. And so he has opened a door for Putin: to test whether the US would actually risk a direct confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power, to defend one of its allies. To ascertain how far the Europeans are willing to go, at a time of doubt about the US commitment to Ukraine and about Europe's ability and willingness to support the attacked country without the US.
“Russia is ‘testing’ Poland and NATO,” says Jedrzej Bielecki, an international politics specialist for the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita. “If there is no reaction,” he adds, “NATO will fall.” For now, Bielecki emphasizes, there has been a reaction. Poland has invoked Article 4 of NATO. Not Article 5, since it has not been confirmed that the drone strike was an attack. But it can be understood as a preliminary step. Article 4 provides for consultations if one of the partners considers its “interterritorial integrity,” its “political independence,” or its “security” to be threatened.
More: For the first time, NATO aircraft have been activated to respond to threats to NATO airspace. To neutralize Russian drones, the Polish armed forces have relied on Dutch, Italian, and German aircraft and weapons. “For Poland, the attack confirms that Russia is a danger,” says Joanna Maria Stolarek, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Warsaw. “And we must prepare to defend NATO's borders. This isn't theory, but rather a stark reality.”
The Russian incursion into Poland is also testing the unity of this deeply polarized country. The division reaches all the way to the top of the state. Prime Minister Tusk is pro-European and pro-Ukraine; the new president, Pawel Nawrocki, is a Eurosceptic conservative and critical of Ukraine. On Wednesday, they closed ranks."The government and the president worked hand in hand, with good coordination of services," Stolarek observes."The daily conflicts between Tusk and Nawrocki have disappeared."
Due to its history, at the mercy of centuries of invasions from the west (Prussia, Germany) and the east (Russia), no country in Europe, except the Baltics, has been more vocal about Putin's risk to Europe. Nor is there a country more interested in demonstrating the validity of alliances with Western democracies: the memory of World War II and the Cold War, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were devoured, is still alive.
“Our common task today, and it must remain so in the near future, is to mobilize the entire West,” Tusk said, “so that Poland never again finds itself in a situation where what seemed like real alliances turned out to be empty alliances.” Today, Poland, the country that has rearmed the most since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, feels more than ever that the facts prove it right and is sending a message to its European partners, who see the threat as more distant, and to Trump: Putin will not stop in Ukraine, and if NATO fails, Russia wins.
