Putin’s Drone Hit a NATO Nerve in Poland, Opening an Opportunity for Ukraine

EXPERT INTERVIEW – More Western leaders and national security experts are now saying that Russia’s recent drone incursion into Poland was not a mission gone wrong as Moscow suggested but was more likely an intended probe to determine how quickly the NATO alliance – created to safeguard security – might rally in the face of an expanded Russian attack.

President Vladimir Putin now has his answer.

In a swift response, NATO announced that it is bolstering it’s eastern flank defenses. Germany is expanding air policing over Poland. France is sending 3 Rafale fighter jets and The Netherlands is sending two Patriot air defenses, NASAMS and counter drone systems to Warsaw. The Czech Republic is sending additional helicopters and up to 150 soldiers to help defend Poland’s borders.

In this expert weekend interview, The Cipher Brief spoke with General David Petraus (Ret.) who was on the ground in Kyiv this week, talking with senior leaders – not only about the seriousness of Russia’s incursion into NATO territory – but also about how technology continues to dramatically alter the battlespace in Ukraine and how Moscow is now using its troops on the ground.

THE CONTEXT

• Around 20 Russian drones entered Polish airspace on September 9 forcing the temporary closure of several airports.
• Polish F-16s and Dutch F-35s downed some of the drones, with NATO aerial refueling and C2 support.
• Russia said the drones were enroute to Ukraine and were not pursuing targets inside of Poland.
• Poland invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty to trigger allied consultation on response. The North Atlantic Council met on September 10 to discuss the situation and denounced Russia. Europe broadly condemned the incursion.
• NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called the incursion “reckless and unacceptable” and warned that the alliance will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” Allied Commander Europe General Alexus Grynkewoch said the alliance will “learn lessons” and improve readiness in response.
• EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said “indications suggest [the incursion] was intentional, not accidental.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said the drones “were quite obviously deliberately directed on this course.”
• After President Donald Trump suggested the incursion may have been a mistake, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday in a post on X that, “We would also wish that the drone attack on Poland was a mistake. But it wasn’t. And we know it.”
• NATO announced Eastern Sentry, a new mission to boost defenses on its eastern flank. The mission is modeled after Baltic Sentry, NATO’s maritime and aerial operation to monitor the Baltic Sea.

THE EXPERT INTERVIEW

General David Petraeus (Ret.)

General David Petraeus served more than 37 years in the U.S. military with six consecutive commands, five of which were combat, including command of the Multi-National Force-Iraq during the Surge, U.S. Central Command, and Coalition and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan. He is a partner in the KKR global investment firm and chairs the firm’s global institute.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk about this week’s Russian drone incursion into Poland, whether you believe it was an accident on Moscow’s behalf or a calculated probe, how significant of an event was this?

General Petraeus: It was a very significant episode. Again, 19 drones entered Polish airspace. The bottom line is that this could not have been a mistake. These aren’t on autopilot. They may have way points from which they’re flying to and from but there is a pilot behind this. And this is quite a significant incursion. Just recently, I saw a report that five of them were actually headed for a major base, which is one of the hubs from which a lot of the NATO equipment is transported into Ukraine. It’s one of the big areas for trans-shipment.

The NATO response was very impressive, in my view. Keep in mind, you had Dutch F-35s, Polish F-16s in the air very rapidly. They clearly must have seen this coming. They’ve rehearsed this in the past. There was an AWACS up there to help them also with the command and control, and early warning tankers were flying so they could refuel as required, and a number of these were shot down by those systems. So quite an impressive response.

And then as a result of that, Poland called for an Article Four gathering. Keep in mind, Article Five is a call to arms, Article Four is a call to meet. They did that at the North Atlantic Council, of course in Brussels at NATO headquarters. And out of that, came a very comprehensive set of actions that NATO will take, which includes the U.S. as part of the air component, but it’s going to beef up all of the different capabilities that would be needed, including anti-air and anti-ballistic missile defenses for those countries on the eastern front and a number of other capabilities as well.

This wasn’t a wake-up call because clearly, they were already awake to the threat, but it was a significant incursion that has generated a significant response. I think the tactical response was very impressive. The operational response – not quite strategic – perhaps you could describe it as that by NATO, was very significant.

I’m hoping that there are even bigger strategic responses though, and that this might be the catalyst in Washington for Congress to work with the White House on the sanctions package that Senator Lindsey Graham and others have been working for a number of months, which would add substantial U.S. sanctions to those already imposed by the EU and European countries [on Russia].

And then on the European side, for this to galvanize support for what is now termed the Von der Leyen plan or concept, which is of course Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who, by the way, gave a stirring State of the Union address written before the incursion, but delivered more recently.

And this is to use those frozen hundreds of billions of dollars, of euros really, of frozen Russian reserves in European banks as collateral to give money to Ukraine now to help them. And as you know, they could build even more drones than the 3.5 million that they’re going to build this year, if they had more money. So, that would be a huge help for them also in terms of their fiscal situation.

And then that money actually goes back to Russia once Russia pays reparations to Ukraine for all the damage and destruction they have wrought in the country here. That’s quite an artful approach because it avoids the actual seizure of these assets, which again, a number of European countries, I think rightly have concern about, that it might undermine the euro attractiveness for this kind of reserve.

I’d love to see those two actions on top of the very quick response and the very quick decisions by the North Atlantic Council to carry out these military actions. Those would be very, very complimentary and show Russia just how serious this was.

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I think in this case, Russia has vastly overplayed its hand, just as I think it has, frankly, in terms of the huge numbers of drones and missiles that have been launched into Ukraine in recent nights that we’ve seen in the Institute for the Study War statistics and so forth that show the highest ever numbers. In the sense that this shows very clearly if there were any shred of doubt whether Vladimir Putin truly was willing to negotiate a ceasefire and agree to some kind of sustained and just peace, that clearly is not in the cards.

The Cipher Brief: General Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander in chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said recently that the direct technological race is accelerating in the battlespace. The technology that is being put into battlefield drones, is being adapted very quickly by Russia. The Cipher Brief visited the Nemesis Regiment with you earlier this year – the separate battalion of the Unmanned Systems Forces that specializes in the use of bomber drones -what has changed on that front over the past few months?

General Petraeus: The Nemesis Regiment is well known here in Ukraine because all [of the military units] are trying to compete for talent, and they have billboards that say, “Sign up for the Nemesis Regiment.” They’re actually able to recruit directly. They now are able to do basic military training themselves as well. The workarounds that they have developed to get talent into uniform as rapidly as possible to make a difference, is really quite impressive. Only a country that is fighting for its very independence, it’s very survival, would be able to do all of this.

You’ll recall that when I was last here and I talked to General Syrskyi and asked just roughly, “How many drones did you use yesterday of all types?” Because of course, they have the maritime drones that have been so effective. They’ve sunk one third of the Black Sea Fleet.

By the way, one of the briefings informed us that the entire remaining Black Sea Fleet is actually all completely in one harbor as far as you can get away from Ukraine, in the eastern part of the Black Sea, essentially a Russian harbor, with lots of defenses around it. So, they have basically forced it to bottle itself up just to survive, because the Ukrainians are still out there picking off occasional Russian patrol boats or carrying out other kinds of action at sea.

They obviously have land drones of all types, remotely driven vehicles that do a lot of the back and forth from the rear to the front lines with logistics and taking casualties and so forth. And then just tons of all different types of aerial drones, including some now that very publicly are out there that reportedly can fly thousands of kilometers into the Russian Federation.

These are now true ballistic missiles on the Ukrainian side, and the numbers of these being produced are beginning to ramp up very substantially. 3.5 million drones will be produced this year. And keep in mind, Syrskyi’s response was that, “We used almost 7,000 drones in a single day.”

I also met with the individuals that do some of the command-control intelligence – and knitting all of this together into a common operational picture that is truly extraordinary. And the 7,000 drones doesn’t quite capture all of this. They said, “In a 12-hour shift there are 40,000 flights.” And again, all of this is being tracked. These are crews that are sending these out very quickly. Some come back, some does not. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the technology race. We learned last time that we were here, that to combat the Russian electronic warfare and jamming, as many as a quarter of the drones that go out from the Ukrainian side have a little fiber optic cable that spools out behind them so that they can maintain the critical command and control links to actually fly these right into the enemy. A lot of these are first-person view suicide drones, as they’re termed.

There are also other advances. The Russians, for example, now are putting jet engines on some of their Shahed drones. And because the way that you knock down drones encompasses all types of different systems – everything from a quite skillful use of heavy machine guns and acoustic sensors, all kinds of radars, everything working together – but if they fly faster, it’s hard for you to [control]. There are drones that actually run into the Russian drones, and again, hundreds of these are out there every night.

The skill of this is extraordinary, but the increased speed makes that much more difficult. So, what you have is a constant back and forth, where one side develops something new and innovative, the other side sees it, reverse engineers it. And then of course, on the Russian side, it’s much more top down, but when they go top down, they can produce huge quantities very quickly. On the Ukrainian side, it’s a lot more like a ‘let 1,000 flowers bloom’ initiative. There is tremendous innovation, but then you’ve got to figure out how to scale it.

And each side is very much going about this in a whole variety of different ways. The sensor component of this is particularly interesting, and then the fusion of all of the different reports. You might get a human intelligence report derived from a number of different methods. How do you then get that into the system, immediately alert those who have the means to actually deal with it, who then delivers this to those who can actually take action against it, kinetic action in many cases?

And what they’re doing is they’re shrinking the time from the so-called sensor to shooter, the ‘kill chain’, as Chris Brose wrote a book with that title. These are just breathtaking kinds of advances. And as you know – because you’ve been here with us – every four or five months or so, you see new advances.

The very first time we spent time within the Nemesis Battalion – now it’s the regiment and it’s going to be a brigade. And of course, it was founded by and still commanded by a former prime minister, the first one under President Zelensky – so everybody’s in this fight. But the first time we were here, I think the drones they were using had one antenna. Last time, I think there were three or four. Now, I think it’s up to six. And of course, you also have the Starlink big board on top of it to communicate with what Elon Musk has put up in the constellation.

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So, this is where the most advanced innovation in the world can be found. I also spent time with all of the defense security assistance folks in the U.S. embassy, which included more than just Americans, by the way. So many allied countries were there as well. And we should be doing much more, the U.S., NATO countries, and other allies and partners around the world that might be threatened by something can learn lessons from here. But of course, the lessons aren’t really learned until they are institutionalized in some way in the military services in the form of doctrine, organizational changes, training, leader development material, and the rest of that. And we’re not doing that at all, I don’t think as assiduously and aggressively as we need to.

I know the service chiefs recognize the imperative of much more rapid innovation, but when you think that nearly 7,000 individual drones, many of which are on multiple missions, and you hear the scale of what it is they’re doing, we’re not remotely there.

In terms of their organizations, the Ukrainians now have in every infantry company, a drone platoon, in every infantry battalion, a drone company, every brigade, a drone battalion. The corps have their own drones. And then there are these independent drone organizations like the Nemesis Regiment, which are active in all kinds of different ways and are apportioned according to the priorities on the battlefield, the most significant threats, the most lucrative targets and so forth.

And as you recall, drone operators get points for the different targets that they strike. The strikes are all validated because you have drones watching drones. And those points can be redeemed for equipment and components that you need in what is an Amazon-like system that was established by Brave One as an adjunct to the DELTA system, which is the overall software platform that is used by all of the elements of their Ministry of Defense and all their services. Noting that they don’t just have an army, navy, air force and marine corps, they also have an unmanned systems force, and the commander of that is incredibly aggressive and innovative.

The Cipher Brief: Given all of the focus on the technology, I think it’s difficult for some people to understand what the front line still looks like today. Russia is still recruiting an incredible number of people with a very tight turnaround time between recruitment and when they’re actually deploy. Can you just give us a picture of what that looks like today?

General Petraeus: Well, in fact, several of our other fellow travelers, as you know, Ralph Goff, Glenn Corn, and Joey Gagnard have been out to the front lines. They were down in the south. The commander down there said there are Russian soldiers who have gone from recruitment to deployment in less than 20 days. In other words, recruits aren’t even getting 30 days of basic training before being integrated into a unit. No time to build cohesion and all the rest of that stuff and it was even less than that for the shortest time that they recorded. This is extraordinary. Moscow is literally taking these individuals off the street, luring them in with huge enlistment bonuses, and these recruits are often from rural areas where the job opportunities are not all that great. And in many cases, the families actually celebrate that they’re doing this because it leads to a massive financial windfall.

The recruits go in very quickly, are issued weapons, uniform, et cetera, and then shoved into the front lines and right into an offensive – keeping in mind that the offensives now are not combined arms. They’re not tanks and armor personnel carrier supported by engineers, infantry, air defense, electronic warfare, artillery, and all the rest. They’re infantrymen, essentially running across the street and trying to establish a foot hold in the next block of buildings. It’s literally proceeding at infantry pace, because the drones are so ubiquitous, the surveillance is so constant. At the minute that they’re spotted, if you get tanks moving, immediately the drones will come out and take them out. So, you have almost blanket coverage except for really extreme weather when they can’t stay up or they can’t see. The rest of the time, it’s impossible for the kind of combined arms attacks that launched this invasion by Russia in the beginning. As you’ll recall then, there were huge columns of tanks and other vehicles, and frankly, even into the second summer of the counteroffensive that was mounted by the Ukrainians. And now, you actually don’t even have as clearly defined front lines as you had then with trench lines and almost World War I-like fortifications. Now you have outposts, and they’ll actually allow the enemy to flow around them a bit because the drones will eventually police them up.

But this is hugely costly to the Russians. And for those Ukrainian units that are using the different command and control intelligence and so forth, tools that are fusing the intelligence and enabling them to be even more effective with the drones than they otherwise would be, the exchange ratio is 10 to 1. And that’s what it needs to be given how much the Russians outman and outgun the Ukrainian forces.

The Cipher Brief: What the sense of urgency now among European leaders you’ve talked to?

General Petraeus: I suspect that the events of the past number of months have probably been pretty sobering. There was some hope. President Trump has made a valiant effort to try to bring this war to an end by engaging Putin, engaging the Europeans and President Zelensky. In a lot of ways, there is renewed confidence because of the improvement in the relationship between President Trump and President Zelensky.

European leaders are trying to come up with a security guarantee – which I think is quite elusive frankly, unless you put your forces in the front lines, you might as well just give all your stuff to the Ukrainians and arm them to the teeth. They’re the security guarantee, I think, for Ukrainian defenses.

So, I think there’s a more sober analysis of the prospects for some kind of ceasefire. Washington has actually gotten the Europeans – in a huge success for the White House, frankly – to increase their defense spending to 3.5% of GDP rather than the 2% that was the old standard. And even 5% when you take into account other investments in infrastructure to push the forces further out to the east and that kind of activity. And to see again, the American commitment, the air commitment to what is going on in response to the Russian drone incursion is very encouraging.

So, I think there’s a degree of confidence the Europeans are picking up their share of this load. The Germans in particular are doubling defense spending in the next 10 years or so, and that is between 700 billion and a trillion euros more than they would’ve spent otherwise.

Washington has tried and done everything they could. President Trump engaged personally, repeatedly, and it should be clear to all now that Putin is just not really serious about negotiating an end to this war. He still has his maximalist objectives of replacing President Zelensky with a pro-Russian figure, essentially disarming Ukraine to the extent that would be possible and taking additional land that they haven’t even been able to seize. They haven’t even yet gotten to the so-called fortified cities in the southeastern part of the country, in Donetsk province in particular. And the loss of any of those is not acceptable to Ukraine or to its leader. In fact, the Constitution of Ukraine does not allow a leader to give away territory or redraw borders.

The Cipher Brief: What else is top of mind for you as you’re on the ground there in Kyiv?

General Petraeus: I’m keen to hear from European and NATO leaders about how much this drone incursion has galvanized additional action. How much European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s stirring European Union address has reinforced that new determination and to get a sense of where that is headed. Because there’s a seriousness of purpose right now that is even greater than it was just days ago. And to put a finger on the pulse of that, I think will be very important and could produce a number of insights. Needless to say, that is very heartening to the Ukrainians who are seeing the prospect of this substantial additional European commitment. They are also heartened by recognition that Washington has done everything it can to try to be the catalyst to bring about a ceasefire. That’s not going to happen, it doesn’t appear. And now, I think there’s a seriousness of purpose in Washington, reinforced, I hope, by this incursion to get that sanctions package through Congress to the White House and into law.

Cipher Brief Writer and Editor Ethan Masucol contributed research for this report.

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