The advance of Russian drones crossed into Poland around 1.50am local time, with several drones reportedly entering the country from Belarus.
As Polish and NATO forces struck them down from the skies, litter and debris rained down across the country. Sky News has verified multiple locations where Russian drones crashed.
Wyryki-Wola, in the Lublin district in eastern Poland, was affected the most. But drones were found in northern, eastern, and southeastern areas of the country. All of these verified locations are residential areas.
A total of seven drones and the remains of an unidentified object were found by Polish authorities across the country.
Sky News has verified three images of the Russian drones that landed in Poland as Chinese-designed ‘Gerbera’ drones. One reached the northern town of Olesno, around 400km from the Ukrainian border.
The Gerbera was first deployed by Russia in July 2024 and is primarily used as a decoy drone.
It gives a very similar radar signature to other destructive drones being used in the war – like Shahed drones – but is built from low-cost materials like plywood or foam, making it about 10% of the price to produce.
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“The Gerbera drones have mostly been used as decoys to be shot down and waste a resource,” says Rick Rickard, Operations Director at EODynamics.
There have been reports of Gerbera drones being weaponised in Ukraine, but it is unclear if the drones in Poland were armed.
“It’s clearly a provocation, but it’s one where Russia can row back from it and say, “no, we didn’t send any armed drones over”, says Rickard.
NATO response
NATO forces were quick to respond to the incursion, with Dutch and Polish fighter jets shooting down several Russian drones, with help from Ukraine.
In a statement President Zelenskyy said, “Ukrainian forces were informing the Polish side through the relevant channels about the movement of Russian drones” through the night.
Flight tracking shows a Dutch refueling plane leaving Eindhoven in the Netherlands at 9.45pm UTC (11.45 local time) – before the drones entered Polish airspace.
It circled for three hours alongside a Polish Air Force plane above Lubin, the district impacted by the overnight drone debris, before returning to the Netherlands.
The refueling planes would have been supporting fighter jets, allowing them to stay airborne for longer – the Dutch defense ministry said their F-35 jets shot down “several Russian drones”.
The Polish Air Force had earlier deployed their plane from Deblin, Poland, at around 7pm UTC (9pm local time), which circled the Lublin area until around 4.25am UTC (6.25am local time).
Drone warfare
This incursion comes at a time when drones are being used heavily in the war in Ukraine.
There have been over 17,500 drone and air strikes on Ukraine so far in 2025, more than double the amount that occurred in the same time period last year.
Most strikes have been concentrated on the Ukrainian front lines, or in major cities like Kiev.
Before today, conflict monitoring organisation ACLED had recoded at least 50 incidents of airspace violations in countries on Ukraine’s western borders since the start of the war. Only four of those occurred in Poland.
“Regardless of whether this was indeed intentional, the downing of a Russian attack and/or decoy drones over NATO territory is bringing everyone involved into uncharted territory,” said ACLED Europe and Central Asia Senior Analyst Nichita Gurcov in a statement.
Military analyst
Why did Moscow extend these tactics last night to encroaching on NATO’s sovereign territory?
Probably for two general reasons.
One was to send a signal to West European governments that any notion of placing European forces inside Ukraine as part of some ‘reassurance force’ in the event of a ceasefire deal would be dangerous.
The Russians constantly declare that any western responses that help Ukraine increase the risk of war in Europe – Moscow’s playbook is very consistent on this issue.
Everything the Europeans say or do that Moscow doesn’t like is met with the idea that it might spark a war with them.
The other reason is that Russia evidently intends in the longer term to challenge NATO in the air, at sea and on the ground, right up to the threshold of outright military hostility – up to the NATO ‘Article 5’ threshold in other words.
It aims to normalise these sort of activities so that the Article 5 boundaries become fuzzy and harder to define.
Then NATO will be a great deal weaker – all the more so if the US has effectively disengaged itself from the European allies.
Additional reporting by Sophia Massam, junior digital investigations journalist.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
