Russian Drones Allegedly Swarm Poland in Major Provocation...But Whose?
Last Sunday Russia launched a large-scale drone attack that was again described as the “largest ever” with some sources counting 805 total drones and decoys launched:
It was followed up on Tuesday with another large attack of over 400+ drones and 50+ various missiles. This strike stood out as a significant number of these drones reportedly flew to Poland, and quite deep into the interior of the country at that, which has never happened before.
As always there were two versions of the story, the “topside” propagandized one where Polish and NATO officials tried their best to carve out an angle of deliberate Russian ‘aggression’, not letting the incident go to waste. And then there was the ‘behind-the-scenes’ version, which painted the incident as much more ‘controlled’ than it seemed, where diplomatic channels calmly coordinated the response.
More specifically, Belarus was said to have warned Poland that wayward drones—which were being affected by Ukrainian EW—were headed their way, with reports even claiming some rogue drones had to be shot down over Belarusian territory as well.
The Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces, General Wiesław Kukuła, announced that the Belarusian side warned Poland about drones approaching its territory.
In an interview on TVN24, he noted that such an attitude was surprising in the context of the tense situation at the land border. At the same time, he emphasized that the Polish side decided to make use of the provided information and did not abandon cooperation.
This is a good sign. Let us recall that in a conversation with Patrycjusz Wyżga on the program "Didaskalia," Colonel Piotr Krawczyk, former head of the Intelligence Agency (2016-2022), clearly stated that the West’s policy, including Poland’s, toward Belarus should be based on pragmatism to avoid pushing the country into Russia’s hands.
The incident was obviously very strange because, while a few errant Russian drones had maybe fallen over other countries here and there—after likely being jammed off their course—this has never happened in such a large scale. This heavily suggests something very fishy, in the way of either a false flag or a coordinated campaign; that is to say, something like an Israeli Stux-net or “pager” operation where a large amount of Russian drones are “tampered with” before hand, whether that’s by digital infection of firmware via virus, or something else.
There were several signs pointing to the ‘false flag’ explanation, for instance a photo of a Russian drone that landed on a Polish “chicken coop” that shows the drone taped together with literal duct tape—click the first photo to enlarge:
This is important because Ukraine was known to have been collecting previously-downed Russian drones in order to “creatively” reuse them for such a purpose. So a previously-destroyed or damaged drone could perhaps need some “work” to make it look whole for the ‘presentation’.
Additionally, Polish homes presented as “destroyed” by Russian drones were outed by citizens as houses that were damaged long ago by natural disasters:
A widely circulated photo of the destruction of a house in Poland, allegedly damaged by a Russian drone strike, is refuted by local residents, who note that this house was heavily damaged during a storm two months ago and its condition has not changed since then. - FRWL
If that wasn’t enough, there was this post from two days before the attack which predicted Ukraine was getting ready for a big drone-related ‘provocation’:
"Post from 09/08/2025 on the "Cartel" channel warning about the preparation of a provocation involving the sending of "pseudo-Russian" UAVs to the West. Actually, the plan was already carried out on September 10."
But how do we reconcile the fact that Belarus essentially admitted that wayward Russian drones were flying to Poland with this false flag angle? More likely it was a combination of all possible tactics, from real jammed drones to “prepared” ones that were made to look like they originated from Russia, as well as an information campaign to distribute fakes like the earlier ‘destroyed home’.
One explanation:
In Poland, the wreckage of 12 Gerber UAVs was found during the day. All without a warhead, did not explode. Expensive missiles costing more than $ 2 million each were used to destroy some of them. In particular, the F-35A of the Dutch Air Force worked like this.
The most popular version is that the "Gerber" "mismatch" encountered a GPS blockade over one of Ukraine's air defense areas and flew to Poland (spoofing?). Gerbers are not equipped with 16-element CRPA antennas (ed: these are the special 16-element Komet GPS receivers now regularly seen in Shahed/Geran drones).
According to the second version, the Gerbers were launched from Ukraine. This version is supported by the large number of Gerber products, which exceeds 1,000. This is not typical for them.
The intent is obvious: another desperate ploy from Zelensky to get NATO involved, even if in small stepwise fashion. The latter almost worked, as Poland made some performative fuss about invoking NATO’s “Article Four” on ‘consultations’.
It turned out that most Poles, however, blamed Ukraine over Russia, astutely aware of Ukraine’s cheap stratagems in trying to drag their country into war:
Trump again sounded off with a major dose of hypocrisy:
Sure, he professed ‘disagreement’ with Israel’s strikes on Qatar prior to that, but he didn’t quite react with the same faux-outrage; that’s not to mention the US having admitted having foreknowledge of the Qatar attacks, which implies a kind of tacit approval of them.
Other even more humorous performative displays were witnessed:
But the most telling narrative around the so-called Russian drone incursion was covered by a slew of articles which pointed to the sheer material cost incurred in attempting to stop these cheap Russian drones:
Poland was shooting down cheap Russian drones with missiles costing 400,000 euros each yesterday, reports Bild.
They managed to shoot down exactly 3 drones out of 25, the fourth possibly crashed on its own.
They were shot down by two F-35 fighters with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. The price of a drone is several thousand euros, which is hundreds of times less than the price of the missile used to shoot it down.
"In the long term, using F-35s against drones makes no military sense," said a senior NATO officer.
Therefore, NATO is already considering other options to counter drones.
Bild writes that Germany currently does not have sufficient resources to effectively combat drones flying at low altitudes.
As another wake up call for NATO, what we learned is that NATO’s supposed most militarily active European ‘power’ was able to only shoot down four out of 25 drones, according to PM Tusk. They did this using extremely advanced and expensive platforms like the F-35. From the BILD piece above:
The F-35 fighter pilots fought the drones with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles. The problem: firing a missile costs more than €400,000—to shoot down a drone that costs just a few thousand euros.
Recall that NATO also has AWACS and other such major assets patrolling the Polish-Ukrainian border and yet were still hardly able to stop a measly 19-drone attack, by their own admission? Depending on how many of those were actually real, one might conclude a real Russian attack on a NATO state with hundreds of drone, as done in Ukraine, would overwhelm them with ease. Recall that even Patriot missile-armed Qatar was unable to stop Israel’s strikes, claiming the attacks were “not detected” by their systems—a kind of telling admission.
The drone breach in fact sent Western military ‘experts’ into a frenzy of alarm:
It is interesting that it happens to coincide with Ukrainian Minister of Defense Denys Shmygal’s new admission that Ukraine has lost its advantage in FPVs on the frontline:
That is to say that as a general threat, Russia is increasingly considered as a kind of terrifyingly unmatched drone superpower in the eyes of the hapless and helpless NATO munchkin-states.
By the way, I point you to the official Russian MOD statement about the Polish incursion, which is interesting:
“There were no intentions to engage targets in Poland” seems worded in an ambiguous enough way as to suggest that perhaps the drones did fly there unintentionally—the only question is how or why.
But the real reason this latest debacle is of particular interest is that tomorrow the long-awaited and long-feared Russian-Belarus Zapad 2025 exercises are kicking off.
A brief history: Zapad, which means West, has long been the premiere Soviet and Russian series of exercises which typically happen only once every four years, and are the largest and most ambitious, often utilizing hundreds of thousands of troops, and are meant to simulate defensive war against NATO.
The most famous of these was the 1981 Zapad, which was the largest in history. It continues to echo and send pangs of fear through the West to this day.
More recently, of course, the Zapad 2021 exercises in September 2021 were used as precursor to the SMO, at least according to NATO.
Four years later the Zapad 2025 series is kicking off, and it has been chattered about since last year, with various rumors and predictions about Russia potentially launching another massive Kiev assault from within Belarus under the exercise’s cover.
So, under the looming cloud of these exercises, and on the heels of the recent drone incursion, Poland is reportedly dispatching 40-50k troops to the Belarusian border, sending sensationalists into swoons of alarm:
'Poland has been preparing for the Zapad-2025 exercises for many months,' Poland's Deputy Minister of National Defence, Cezary Tomczyk, told Polsat News television late Wednesday.
'Polish and NATO soldiers are needed to adequately respond to Zapad-2025,' he said, adding: 'This is where the war in Ukraine began. Therefore, the Polish army is preparing for this. In the coming days, we will have about 40,000 soldiers at the border.'
Of course, though the alarmists may be hyping things up for propaganda purposes, the truth is that some danger does lie in the potential for provocations to occur. It would be elementary for Ukraine to launch some kind of false flag, knowing tens of thousands of Polish troops are chafing at the border on a tense hair-trigger. In fact, it’s quite plausible that the “coincidental” drone attack on Poland was engineered precisely to raise the temperature and stoke the flames right on the eve of these exercises in order to prep the oven for tensions to be ignited further with some triggering ‘event’.
Most likely, nothing will happen. Belarus has just boosted its relationship with the US when Trump’s delegation was warmly received by Lukashenko for meetings yesterday. Trump even sent Lukashenko a gift of White House-adorned cufflinks and an additional gesture of goodwill in the form of lifting sanctions on Belarus’ state airline Belavia, which would facilitate a convenient new legal transit point from the US to Russia via Minsk.
BREAKING: Donald Trump has lifted US sanctions on Belarus’ state airline Belavia.
Direct flights from Minsk to the United States are set to resume, following talks in Minsk between President Alexander Lukashenko and Trump’s envoy John Cole.
This is all after Trump had called Lukashenko a “very respected man, a strong person and strong leader.”
Given that Trump still has not acted on any of his hollow threats against Russia, we can assume Trump continues to seek rapprochement with Russia and its bloc and would not be a part of any provocations surrounding the Zapad exercises. It’s left to Zelensky’s devious chicanery to determine what happens, as the temptation to use the exercises to engineer a clash between Russia and the West must surely be high amongst Zelensky’s clique, particularly Budanov and his ilk.
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A couple quick last items:
Many believe just because there is no visible proof all the time, that Russia is not actively destroying Ukrainian air defenses, particularly the Patriot and other ‘top shelf’ European ones like IRIS-T, etc. Here we have another recent report from Ukraine’s own sources of Patriot battery personnel taken out by a Russian strike:
As I had written on X of the above description of the attack:
Wow that's a really roundabout way of saying he was hit by an Iskander.
"The downed debris from a ballistic missile was heading toward his Patriot battery, he rushed to put out the fire but then the warhead of the downed Iskander exploded."
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Similarly, another Ukrainian fighter jet and pilot were quietly taken out earlier:
Today during a combat mission, a Ukrainian Su-27 aircraft crashed – Major Oleksandr Mykolayovych Borovyk, a pilot of the 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade, died. -- AFU
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By the way:
Today I chose not to write on the Charlie Kirk assassination despite it being the main global news story for two reasons: one, to gather my thoughts without knee-jerk reactions; and two, it somehow felt excessive as everyone was already flooding the information plain with every possible take and twist and there was really little to add without beating the same old demagogic drums.
That being said, I figured I’d pose the question, should we cover the topic here? Or is there enough talking-points-pollution already out there, leading to readers’ fatigue on the issue?
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I'd leave Kirk alone. There're so many other deserving topics to explore. The Balkans for example were the center of attention for Lavrov. Or the Arab proxies having a first ever Summit with Russia on 15 October. Or Venezuela's military capabilities. Or the situation in Nepal and its potential effect on Chinese-Indian relations. Or what US MIC corps are telling their stockholders about expansion plans or the lack thereof. As for me, I'll be translating Putin's chat with the director of Russia's Agency for Strategic Initiatives and whatever might present itself Friday.
Zelensky the Ultimate Proxy, The King of All Proxies was searching for his own Proxy in Poland already in November of 2022. As Andrzej Duda revealed in an interview that was the time when a missile coming from Ukraine crossed into Poland. Duda evaluated the situation at the time as a false flag from Ukraine and refused to swallow the bait. Almost three years later, Ukraine’s internal and military stability gone, Zelensky would do anything to drag US/NATO into the war. With Trump’s words: He is playing with WWIII. BUT Trump is doing the exact same thing. He released a few words after the drones arrived in Poland like ‘There we go’ or something like that that was interpreted by the stock market as a possible call for military action against Russia. If any attack on a NATO nation really takes place the No.1 suspect should be Ukraine.
It is also suspicious that some of those small plastic drones flew very deep into Poland; they hardly have the range to make this flight from Russia, a distance of close to 500 miles. (Zelensky will probably state at his next interview that Evil-Putin worked out the details for in-flight refueling for his Evil-Drones.)