Over the past few days, Putin has been treating NATO’s airspace as his own training ground.
First, 23 Russian drones flew over Poland. A day later a Russian drone appeared over Romania. Then, four days ago, the Russians switched to manned aircraft, sending three MIG-31 fighter jets on a mission over Estonia.
NATO’s responses to those flagrant violations of its members’ sovereignty have varied from feeble to nonexistent. Most commentators treated the overflights as ‘provocations’, which raises a question.
Exactly what was Putin trying to provoke? A diplomatic rebuke? NATO’s customary expression of deep concern, later to be upgraded to a warning? Not likely. He has already gathered such a large collection of such things that I doubt there’s any room left for more in his trophy cabinet.
Western commentators and, worse still, governments act like scared children who cover their eyes in the hope that the perceived danger will thereby disappear. It won’t, and grown-ups should know that.
Allow me to spell it out, chaps: Putin is preparing for war. An aggressive one. With NATO. And this preparation is in its final stages.
Every offensive in history has started with a scouting mission to determine the target’s strength, deployment and likely response. For the past 100 years or so, overflights of enemy territory have figured prominently among such stratagems.
They test both the enemy’s ability to resist aerial attacks and its resolve to do so. If the ability is unimpeachable and the resolve unshakable, the aggressor may have second thoughts or perhaps change tack. If, on the other hand, the enemy shows neither ability nor resolve, the aggressor’s finger will inch closer to the ‘Go’ button.
Putin’s finger is twitching at the moment. For in all three cases NATO failed both tests, showing that neither its air defences nor, more important, its morale is battle-worthy.
It probably hasn’t escaped commentators’ attention that Russia is already fighting a war against a NATO ally, though regrettably still not its member. And over the past three and a half years, the nature of that war has changed dramatically.
Generals, goes the saying attributed to Churchill, always fight the last war. That was said in 1940, when Rundstedt, Manstein and Guderian showed Gamelin and Weygand how hopelessly behind the times they were. Modern war was all about lightning strikes with massed armour, not suicidal infantry attacks on fortified positions.
That was the last war for the Russian high command in 2022, and at first their invasion of the Ukraine followed the same pattern. Columns after columns of Russian armour poured into the Ukraine, only for the Ukrainian artillery, missiles and drones to turn them into heaps of charred scrap metal.
Ukrainians too tried to use their own tank thrusts as counteroffensive, with largely the same result. Both sides have since learned the lessons, paying their tuition fees in hundreds of thousands of lives and billions’ worth of wrecked kit. Step by step, they turned their battle stations into PlayStations.
Unmanned aircraft, drones, are for modern war what tank pincer movements were for the Second World War and cavalry charges for the First. Costing next to nothing in the general scheme of things, drones, augmented with manned aircraft, can paralyse a country’s economy, terrorise populations and negate any possible counteroffensive.
That’s why anti-aircraft defences in general and anti-drone defences in particular become vitally important. Both the Ukraine and Russia are churning out thousands of the blasted things, with the Russians also importing them from the friendly ayatollahs.
And Ukrainians have learned how to deal with those deadly locusts. They shoot down close to 90 per cent of them, which is impressive even though, considering the numbers involved, the remaining 10 per cent still cause horrendous damage.
When 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace, the response was pathetic. The combined efforts of Polish, Dutch, Italian and German AA defences managed to down only four of the drones, falling far short of the Ukrainian ratio.
Can you imagine what would have happened to Poland had it been attacked not by 23 unarmed drones but by 2,400 armed ones? I can’t.
The key question there isn’t just ‘how many?’ but also ‘how?’. NATO scrambled fighter jets that fired at the Russian drones with their air-to-air missiles. Each AIM-120 AMRAAM missile costs about $1 million, while the next-generation AIM-260 will cost several times that.
If it takes a million-dollar missile to hit a Shahed drone costing a few hundred dollars, one realises that even if NATO countries increase their defence spending to 100, not five, per cent of GDP, they’ll run out of money within days of combat.
Ukrainians have learned a more cost-effective method. They use YAK-52 training planes made between 1979 and 1999. These cheap aircraft, some with wooden propellers, have open cockpits from which gunners fire their rifles at the drones with devastating effect.
That particular recce yielded another encouraging finding for Putin. Even though three US bases are sited in Poland, American forces took no part in the action. One can just see Putin grinning ear to ear: his friend Donald may occasionally talk tough but, push come to shove, he’ll just coo like a dove of peace and do nothing.
When a Russian drone appeared in the sky over Romania, the pilots were authorised to shoot it down but decided not to. The country’s defence ministry said it “assessed the collateral risks and decided not to open fire”.
What collateral risks exactly? Since the drone didn’t overfly any densely populated areas, downing it wouldn’t have endangered life and property. The only collateral risk I can imagine would have been Putin’s displeasure, meaning that yet again NATO couldn’t conceal its cowardly tendency to appease the evil aggressor.
Oh yes, I forgot, Romanians did respond to that criminal attack by summoning the Russian ambassador and berating him in no uncertain terms. Who says NATO leaves aggression unanswered?
As for the violation of Estonia’s airspace, an historical reminder is in order. On 24 November 2015, a Russian SU-24M fighter-bomber penetrated Turkish territory to a depth of 1.36 miles and stayed there for 17 seconds. That was enough time for a Turkish F-16 to shoot it down.
In the aftermath, Putin huffed, puffed and threatened every manner of apocalypse. Soon thereafter, however, he and Erdogan kissed and made up, though I’m not sure about the kissing part. Like all bullies, the KGB dictator respects leaders who speak his language, using missiles in lieu of words.
On 19 September 2025, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated the Estonian airspace near Vaindaloo Island (not to be confused with an Indian curry). There they stayed for 12 minutes (as distinct from 17 seconds) before two Italian F-35s intercepted the invading MiGs and…. shot them down?
Don’t be silly. What do you think this is, Turkey c. 2015? No, the Italians gallantly escorted the MiGs back to the border and waved their wings good-bye.
Understandably irate, Estonia invoked Article 4 of the NATO Charter, which initiates discussion among members but without mandating any response.
When the doors of that talk shop opened, Estonia correctly stated that the incursion into its airspace was “part of a broader pattern of testing Europe’s and NATO’s resolve”, and “another dangerous act to further escalate regional and global tensions as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine”.
The situation is so fraught with danger that nothing short of an expression of concern or perhaps even a stern warning will do. Make it grave concern and final warning to emphasise the magnitude of the problem. That’ll send Putin back to his bunker, tail between his legs.
As far back as the 6th century BC, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu formulated this principle: “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” The idea of the former was to lure the enemy into precipitate action, the better to rout its forces.
NATO got it almost right: it appears weak when it is weak. Unless this situation changes quickly – and I don’t know what kind of timetable Russian generals are plotting – well, you don’t need me to tell you what can happen.
Take it from someone who grew up with Russian bullies, schoolyard to KGB. As Turkey showed in 2015, they retreat from a show of force. And, as I’m afraid we’ll soon find out, they pounce on a show of weakness.
Born in 1933, I lived in lively awareness through WWII and am very unwilling to endure another such event before I die. But it certainly looks as though one is coming, and too soon for anyone’s health. In 1939 the UK was coherent enough eventually to gather its skirts and hold the fort. Now, it is crammed with immigrants = foreigners. Will they fight? I doubt it. The parallels at the political top are frighteningly close. Chanberlain + Baldwin = Starmer. No Churchill equivalent is to be seen. None of the Services is worth a damn and the supporting industrial might is largely non-existent. Woe is us!
Wise — an disconcerting — words, these. Backtracking three years from 1939, however, had the UK had gained coherence then, the war might not have happened, almost certainly wouldn’t have happened. Hard choices have to be made before before fighting becomes the only choice, and you are right: one doesn’t see any leaders anywhere in the West capable of doing what’s necessary. Nor does one see any masses of people able to rise out of their torpor and apathy.
Although our formations are very different, Mr Boot, we seem to see eye-to-eye on this issue. However, there is one imponderable difference that is either a comfort or a major added problem: the atomic bomb dimension.
Is its threat so real that it will deter the kind of aggression we foresee? Or do the threats cancel out? I have no knowledge of “expert” thinking on this subject. Do you?