by Larry Johnson
The drone that crossed Poland
On the night of October 18, Ukraine launched what the Russian Defense Ministry called more than 1,000 drones at Russia, the largest such attack of the war. St. Petersburg and Leningrad oblast took the brunt. The Petersburg oil terminal and the Ruchyi depot burned (pic at right) a VK data center was hit, Pulkovo airport closed for eight hours, and at least one person was killed. One of those drones did not reach its target. It exploded in Lithuania’s Pasvalys district, hitting a moving car.
Lithuania’s defense minister, Robertas Kaunas, says the drone entered Lithuania from Polish airspace. Lithuania’s prime minister says there is “no doubt” it came from the Polish side, and Vilnius says it has credible evidence the drone crossed the Polish border. Ukraine has admitted the drone was Ukrainian and apologized, blaming Russian electronic warfare for pushing it off course. Warsaw, for its part, says its radars show no confirmation of a crossing, has denied leaked reports that the drone was launched inside Lithuania, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk has demanded an explanation from Kyiv. The two NATO allies have now set up a joint team to investigate.
Warsaw’s denials do not square with what I have learned, and the stray drone in Lithuania is the smaller part of the story. An independent source tells me that the drone that struck St. Petersburg was itself launched from a site inside Poland. This was not a Ukrainian weapon that wandered through Polish airspace by accident. The attack on Russia’s second city began on Polish soil. That is the difference between an embarrassing incident and an act of war. A strike on St. Petersburg flown from the territory of a NATO member makes Poland a participant in that strike, whatever its government says in public.
It also explains a lot. Russian media have taken to calling it the “Baltic route”: Ukrainian long-range drones flying up the NATO side of the border, through Polish and Baltic airspace that Russian air defenses cannot touch, and then turning east into Russia. Ukrainian drones bound for Russia have strayed into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland several times this year. A launch point in Poland shortens the flight to St. Petersburg, keeps the drones out of Belarusian and Russian air defenses for most of the trip, and puts the operation under NATO’s air-defense umbrella. Lithuania’s officials, who have been more candid than Warsaw, have already said the drone that came down in their country crossed from the Polish side, which fits the same picture. Moscow is not going to treat the country that launched the strike on St. Petersburg as a bystander.
Will Russia retaliate against Poland?
I expect it will. In public, the Kremlin has so far kept its powder dry. Peskov’s answer to the St. Petersburg strikes was that Russia is already hitting Ukraine “constantly,” and on October 20 the Defense Ministry reported strikes on the launch sites of Ukraine’s long-range drones. There has been no public threat against Poland yet. But Moscow rarely announces its responses in advance, and it has drawn a clear line before: a state that lets its territory be used to strike Russia becomes a party to the conflict.
Russia has options well short of open war and every incentive to use them: hitting the launch infrastructure itself, electronic warfare that spills across the border, drones and missiles probing Polish airspace as they did in September 2025, sabotage against the logistics hubs that feed Ukraine, and pressure on the Suwalki corridor between Belarus and Kaliningrad. Any of those could come quickly. Each carries a risk of escalation that nobody in Warsaw, Vilnius or Brussels has been asked to vote on, and NATO’s Article 5 was never meant to protect a member that launches attacks on Russia’s cities and then cries foul when Russia answers.
Western policy toward this war rests on a set of comforting numbers: Russia is barely advancing, Russia is running out of men, Russia will not dare respond. When the numbers are wrong, the policy built on them is wrong too. ISW’s “100 square kilometers” tells Western leaders they can keep raising the stakes at no cost. A strike on St. Petersburg launched from Poland, with a stray drone exploding in a Lithuanian field, is a reminder that the cost is real, and that it is coming closer to home.