The war in Ukraine entered into a dangerous new phase on Wednesday as 19 unmanned aerial vehicles aimed at Ukraine launched from Russia (and Belarus, according to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk) penetrated and transited Polish airspace simultaneously in conjunction with a large-scale missile and drone assault on Ukraine itself. Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s shot down a number of these vehicles, assisted by other elements of NATO’s Air Policing mission, including Italian Early Warning Radar and refueling aircraft (with some German Patriot Missiles also having been put on alert). As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (a former German defense minister) noted, this event marked a “reckless and unprecedented violation of Poland’s and Europe’s airspace.”
Although this was not the first Russian airspace violation of European air sovereignty, as EU Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas observed, it was “the most serious European airspace violation by Russia since the war began, and indications suggest it was intentional, not accidental.” Polish PM Tusk has suggested that the incident pushed his country “the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.” Russia’s action clearly represents a vertical and horizontal escalation (by virtue of both intensity and geographic points of launch) of the conflict. There should be no mistaking what is going on here. The response to this recent attack is about much more than Ukraine’s continued independence, critical as that is. NATO’s riposte must clearly and unequivocally deter Vladimir Putin from attacking NATO in the future, thereby plunging Europe and the U.S. into a new world war, possibly a nuclear one.
Why would Putin take these steps and why now?
As the late Donald Rumsfeld was fond of observing, “Weakness is provocative.” Despite months and months of threats, meetings with Putin and other Russian leaders, and expiring deadlines, there is no indication that President Donald Trump is any closer to pulling the trigger on additional sanctions now that his 50-day deadline and his two-week post-Anchorage deadline have passed. Trump’s hesitation to impose sanctions—along with other steps like the reports that the U.S. will stop funding the Baltic Security Initiative that provides roughly $220 million in security assistance to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—seems to be having real world consequences on the battlefield.
Russia has stepped up its drone and missile assault on Ukraine with multiple days of massive attacks on civilian targets. Although the administration vigorously denies reports that the Pentagon has delayed vital arms deliveries, Ukraine is still desperately short of air defenses. Trump’s demands that Europe put 100 percent tariffs on Indian and Chinese imports of Russian oil are no substitute for a real effort to impose economic costs on Russia, which could be done by other means (see more below).
Putin has appeared increasingly confident in his public appearances and remarks since the Alaska summit, and his thuggish henchmen Dmitry Peskov, Dmitry Medvedev, and Ruslan Mamedov are increasingly shrill in threatening the West. We can only conclude that Putin, sensing U.S. hesitation and weakness, has clearly upped the ante and believes he can win on the battlefield, that Trump will do little to oppose him, and that he can drive wedges (a time-honored Russia tactic) in the Western alliance between the U.S. and its European allies.
Putin has ostentatiously made clear that he has no interest in the bilateral meeting with Zelensky or a trilateral meeting with both Zelensky and Trump that the latter has been promoting publicly since the meeting in Alaska. Putin has also made clear that security guarantees that include NATO member nations’ troops on Ukrainian territory are a nonstarter for him. Wednesday’s foray into Polish airspace clearly carries with it the menace that he is ready to strike NATO territory if the Europeans follow through and station troops in Ukraine as part of a reassurance force. In short, he has repudiated in word and action all the things to which Trump and his negotiator Steve Witkoff have suggested Putin had agreed in meetings in Moscow and at the summit in Anchorage.
Putin’s latest escalatory step is a test of U.S., European, and NATO limits. Ret. Gen Ben Hodges, a former U.S. commander of Army Forces in Europe, has suggested the drone incursion was “a rehearsal. To probe, and find out how good are our early warning systems, what are our reaction times.”
As Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said, the “deliberate attack … had two purposes: to provoke and to test.” The more serious and dangerous aspect of this escalation was the political test that Putin was engineering. He has, for many years, sought to break the NATO alliance and, in particular, to expose as empty the U.S. security guarantee enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO treaty that an attack on one is an attack on all. Putin’s objective is to cast all this in doubt—to make plain to Europeans that they should give up the hope that if attacked the U.S. would ride to the rescue as it had done twice in the last century.
There is a danger that he will succeed. Over the past decade and a half, across administrations of both parties, Europeans have developed doubts about U.S. reliability and commitment to the common defense. And Putin is cranking up the pressure. On September 12, Russia and Belarus will kick off their Zapad 2025 military exercise, the first time a strategic command staff exercise has been conducted since 2021, when it was used, in part, to mask the buildup of Russian forces for the invasion of Ukraine. This version of the exercise “could indicate a returned focus on potential conflict scenarios between Russia and NATO,” and “will include a rehearsal of joint Russian-Belarusian planning to employ nuclear weapons,” according to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service.
Although NATO has done its part, both in defending Polish air sovereignty and subsequently meeting in Brussels in response to Poland’s Article 4 request for urgent consultations, this moment calls for a united transatlantic response. Failure to follow up these initial steps with prompt and condign action will only invite more and more dangerous provocations by Putin.
There are several steps that the United States and our global allies can—and should—take now to limit Russia’s ability to escalate this conflict and support Ukraine’s defense.
In the economic realm, there should be sanctions against Russia’s key energy enterprises—Gazprom, Rosneft, and Lukoil—and the U.S. should adopt the EU price cap on Russian oil at roughly $48 a barrel rather than the current $60. The prospect of the U.S. joining the EU in this measure, bruited about before the Anchorage summit, was surely a motivating factor in getting Putin to agree to the summit in the first place. The decrease in the price cap will force Russian oil companies to seek other carriers, give greater leverage to buyers to seek bigger discounts, and create greater uncertainty in the market, thereby reducing the attractiveness of Russian oil purchases.
Russia maintains a “ghost fleet” of hundreds of ships to illicitly ship oil, and some of those ships have already been sanctioned. The Biden administration designated 300 vessels for sanctions before leaving office, and the EU added sanctions on ships in both May and July—bringing the total it sanctioned to 444. Both parties could designate even more vessels, forcing the Russians to seek out more expensive and less reliable options and reducing government oil and tax revenues.
To help Ukraine defend itself, the U.S. and EU should seize the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, the bulk of which are held in Europe, and turn them over to Ukraine to sustain indigenous Ukrainian defense production and purchase additional U.S. and European weapons. The U.S. can also turn the tap on additional military assistance—particularly air defense interceptors. But Ukraine also needs offensive capabilities, and it’s time that the U.S. support its long-range strike campaign, including lifting all remaining range restrictions on use of U.S. weapons.
Finally, NATO should issue a warning that, although it would be well within its rights to respond now to aircraft launched from Belarus, any future air sovereignty violations of a NATO member’s airspace from bases there will elicit a response that imposes serious military costs on that country.
As Mark Twain may or may not have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Today, in our amnesiac culture where the study of the past is frequently dismissed or ignored, too few people are aware of the lessons of the late 1930s, when rising authoritarian and militarized states like Italy, Germany, and Japan challenged the existing international order. Had the collective West intervened to halt Adolf Hitler’s annexation of the Rhineland, takeover of Austria, coercion of Britain and France into forcing Czech cession of the Sudetenland, or imperial Japan’s invasion of China, World War II might never have occurred. The failure to stop these aggressive dictators led to unparalleled tragedy and the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind. Vladimir Putin is following in Hitler’s and imperial Japan’s footsteps. If we allow this escalation to go unanswered, it will bring the shadow of war ever closer.
