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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Intel officials are split on whether Russia deliberately flew drones
into Poland but agree Putin is getting more aggressive
By Katie Bo Lillis, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Natasha Bertrand, CNN
Updated:
9:16 AM EDT, Fri September 19, 2025
Source: CNN
In the week since NATO fighter jets scrambled to that had crossed into
alliance airspace in Poland, US and Western intelligence officials have
been unable to determine whether the incursion was accidental or an
intentional effort by Russia to probe Western air defenses and gauge
NATO’s response.
Officials cautioned that either way, the episode still represents a
worrying signal that the Kremlin’s willingness to pique NATO —
perhaps at the risk of escalating the conflict — has grown.
“It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” a senior Western
intelligence official said. “There’s certainly something that has
changed in the way that the Kremlin is thinking about their risk
tolerance on targeting.”
But intelligence gathered about the drones themselves — their flight
pattern and their technical specifications — has been mixed and
difficult to interpret.
Ukraine and Poland have both said publicly that they are convinced the
incursion was deliberate — an assessment shared by multiple European
nations.
But President Donald Trump last week told reporters it “could have
been a mistake,” earning him a public rebuke from Polish Prime
Minister Donald Tusk, who said “we know” the incursion was no
mistake.
In conversations with a dozen senior US and Western military,
intelligence, diplomatic and congressional officials, it was clear that
there is no consensus view across the NATO alliance.
One senior US military official in the region put the odds that Russia
intentionally entered NATO airspace at “50-50.”
Absent clear intelligence out of Russia — one of the intelligence
community’s hardest targets — it’s a nearly impossible case to
adjudicate with high confidence, outside analysts said. That puts NATO
in the uncomfortable position of determining how to respond to an
unprecedented incident without a clear sense of what Russia intended.
“We just don’t have sufficient intel one way or another,” said
another US source familiar with the intelligence.
Although the senior Western intelligence official said that the drones
flight pattern suggested that the drones were lost and attempting to
reacquire a GPS signal — suggesting they had simply been knocked off
course by Ukrainian jamming — other indicators could be interpreted
either way.
The fact that many of the Russian drones were unarmed dummies could
mean that Russia wanted to probe Polish air defenses without running
the risk of any casualties. But many of the drones Russia sends into
Ukraine in any attack are dummies, designed to spoof and exhaust
Ukrainian air defenses, experts say. This, too, could be coincidental.
And the sheer number of drones that veered into Poland is hardly
dispositive, senior officials and outside analysts said, because the
drones are often programmed in bulk and in attacks of this size, it’s
logical that 19 or 20 might encounter Ukrainian electronic war defenses
and respond identically. In the last several weeks alone, there have
been at least four salvos from Russia into Ukraine that involved more
than 400 projectiles in the air at once, the senior Western
intelligence official noted.
Privately, some officials have formed an opinion. The senior Western
intelligence official told CNN that they were “leaning” towards an
assessment that the incident was unintentional, even as they condemned
it as a worrying sign that the Kremlin has become more reckless. The US
source familiar with the intelligence agreed.
Yet, another US military official and one congressional official
familiar with the intelligence said it appeared intentional.
Ukrainian officials contacted by CNN acknowledged that Kyiv deploys
electronic warfare and jamming during Russian aerial attacks, which can
cause enemy drones to go off their programmed course. Another Russian
drone veered into Romania earlier this week. But a senior official
added that he had “never witnessed such huge deviations” in more
than three years of war.
“This is the balance. Are we dismissing this or are we thinking this
is a significant escalation in the sense that Russia is now directly
probing its potential adversaries air defenses?” said Samuel Bendett,
an expert in Russian military technology.
Ukrainians concerned military support may be diverted to NATO members
Though Ukrainian officials had initially hoped the Russian drone
incident would spark a strong response from Western allies, Kyiv has
emphasized that surging more air defense systems and munitions to the
country should be the priority. Ukraine has appealed for more US made
Patriot systems, and some officials now fear that materiel might now be
redirected to NATO allies on its border.
If the incursion was intentional, said the congressional official
familiar with the intelligence, it was likely designed to do a number
of things: probe Western defenses to gauge the reaction time, learn
more about how NATO responds, map the routes used by the West to ship
weapons into Ukraine and identify future targets — and of course,
antagonize the West. Russia might hope that raising the specter of
civilian casualties in a NATO country could create fissures in public
support for the war in Ukraine, noted the senior Western intelligence
official.
But even if it was unintentional, the senior Western intelligence
official said, the episode suggested that Russia is more willing to
risk an accidental strike on NATO, either through sloppy targeting or
inadequate electronic warfare defenses or something else. That
heightens the risk of a dangerous miscalculation that could end in
direct conflict.
“Whether it was intentional or not, it is absolutely reckless, it is
absolutely dangerous,” NATO Secretary Mark Rutte said over the
weekend, while cautioning that the assessment remained ongoing.
But part of what makes Russia’s intentions so difficult to parse is
the fact that Moscow often engages in provocative actions behind a
shady gauze of plausible deniability. The episode might have, in fact,
been designed to appear inadvertent, multiple officials and outside
experts said.
The Russian military has said only that there were “no plans to
target facilities on the territory of Poland.” And according to
Bendett, one Russian UAV expert has noted that Russia’s armed drones
have military grade antennas and sensors that were able to overcome
Ukrainian electronic warfare tactics, while the dummy drones that flew
into Poland, with cheaper GPS and other sensors, were not.
Poland has said that Belarus, whose territory the drones were launched
from, also sent warning that off-course drones were headed for its
airspace.
Both of those things are why the senior Western intelligence official
says they believe the episode was an accident.
“Usually if the Russians intended something like this, they don’t
talk about it,” this person said.
But of course, those two data points could also have been part of an
elaborate smokescreen. Russia may have been looking for “a way to see
what’s up in a way that would be easy to walk back, dismiss, and have
everybody say, ‘This was not an intentional strike,’” Bendett
said — an incursion that was “intentional to make it look
unintentional.”
“These are the logical and intellectual questions we’re all
wrestling with,” he said. “A lot in NATO and Eastern Europe are
saying this was likely intentional precisely because we would all be
saying, ‘Well, an attack of 800 drones and 20 were off course? Yeah,
that’s a margin of error that’s acceptable in such a large
attack.’”
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