Poland will lead an effort to build a “drone wall” to block Europe’s airspace to swarms of Russian UAVs should a pan-regional war ever break out.

Russia has been probing Nato’s eastern flanks in recent weeks staring with a drone incursion on September 10 when 19-22 Russian Gerbera reconnaissance drones entered Polish airspace and flew halfway across the country. Since then Denmark, Romania and Estonia have all also reported incursion by drones or jets.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the incursions an escalation and Poland triggered Nato’s Article 4 for the first time ever, demanding urgent consolations with Nato allies as the country’s security was threatened. But the incursions also highlighted glaring weaknesses in Nato’s defences against a large-scale drone attack.

The first was the huge mismatch between the cost of the attacking and defending weapons: Poland is reported to have spending $1.2bn to counter drones that cost $10,000-$20,000 each. The second is that the air defences struggled to bring only four out of nearly two dozen drones down, but Russia currently producing around 2.5mn drones a year and regularly swarms them in their hundreds for an attack: the Iran-designed Shahed 136, or Gerrad-2, attack drones, long-distance strategic drones that can fly more than 1,000km, the heavy FAB glide bombs that carry a massive TNT payload, hunter-killer pairs that target infantry and Chinese decoy drones to confuse the defence.

As the miliary adage goes: Nato generals are fighting the last war, having equipped themselves with expensive and sophisticated air defence ammo designed to bring down powerful cruise and ballistic missiles. But the war in Ukraine has changed the game. Now the threat is from cheap, low-tech and mass-produced drones that swarm in their hundreds accompanied by rapidly evolving electronic warfare (EW) that has already some of the most sophisticated in the world.

European Nato members need to evolve defence plans fast after a series of incidents in which Russia used to drones to sow chaos in Poland, Romania, Denmark and Nato (but not EU) member Norway.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is urging member states to back plans for a coordinated “drone wall” along the Union’s eastern flank, stretching for some 3,500 kilometres from Finland to Poland.

 

The asymmetry of cost

Military hardware designed to defend national airspace — fighters and air-to-air missiles, which Poland used to fend off danger — is expensive to operate against low-cost unmanned systems, the Commission admitted.

“The incursion of Russian drones into Polish airspace showed the EU faces enormous threats,” said Thomas Regnier, a Commission spokesman. He urged member states to use the bloc’s spending tools and defence programmes as the practical route to build common capabilities.

“We are in a crisis… Member states are now in the spotlight and must submit national plans by November 30. We will take care of the rest,” Regnier said.

Following a real possibility of the US cutting back on its military involvement in Europe under President Donald Trump, the EU has hastily fashioned tools to address gaps in defence financing.

The EU has introduced a new €150bn  SAFE (Security Action for Europe) defence loans instrument that is already almost entirely disbursed, with Poland taking a third (€43bn) and France (€16bn) Hungary (€16bn) and Romania (€17bn) taking almost half.

There are also existing initiatives such as the European Defence Fund and the forthcoming European Defence Industrial Programme that could underwrite procurement and joint development of the EU’s drone wall.

The policy rationale is clear. Advanced fighters cost tens of millions of dollars apiece — industry figures put modern jets at roughly $80mn–$100mn each — and their missiles can exceed $400,000 a shot. By contrast, the low-end strike drones deployed in recent raids can cost as little as €20,000.

Analysts warn that hundreds or even thousands of such platforms, deployed in coordination, would quickly overwhelm conventional air defences and deplete budgets and munitions in a matter of months, if not weeks, on top of the political and psychological strain on government and societies. Especially when coupled with a flood of misinformation, which was indeed the case during the September 10 attack on Poland: a poll found that one in three Poles thought the drone attack came from Ukraine thanks to Russian disinformation.

Kyiv’s improvisation, Europe’s blueprint

Now the EU is looking to the experts, Ukraine, for inspiration and expertise. Over three years into the war, Ukraine has grown into Europe’s top military, battle-tested and proven ingenuity that drove the drone revolution.

The EU needs to “turn Ukrainian ingenuity into an advantage on the battlefield and into shared industrialisation,’” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said earlier this month, describing a €6bn package aimed at harnessing Ukrainian counter-drone solutions and scaling production across the EU.

Kyiv already offers practical prototypes. Ukrainian engineers have built acoustic-sensor networks that identify small, low-flying drones by their sound signature and relay positions to mobile teams equipped with light-to-medium anti-air weapons. The approach is far less costly than firing missiles or committing jets, and Lithuania, Latvia and Romania are among the states testing similar concepts.

Zelenskiy has offered Poland training in countering Iranian-made Shahed drones, and Warsaw and Kyiv have set up a joint working group to share operational lessons and develop interoperable counter-UAS measures. The memorandum signed by Ukrainian and Polish officials last week tasked the group with testing deployment concepts, integrating new technologies and aligning standards with Nato, Poland’s defence ministry said.

Planned EU talks on September 26 will bring Ukraine together with seven member states — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria — to discuss capability shortfalls, interoperable architectures and procurement options.

Hungary and Slovakia were not invited, in an omission reflecting political fault lines inside the EU over Russia policy. Trump’s new U-turn on Ukraine — he told the UN’s General Assembly last week Ukraine can win back all of its territory Russia has occupied since 2022 and demanded Europe to sever any economic ties with Russia — might help soften Hungary and Slovakia’s position on Russia eventually.

As Russia’s provocations do not exclude sending drones and planes into Nato airspace, the alliance has responded in the traditional way. In the aftermath of three Russian MiG-31s briefly violating of Estonian airspace on September 19 before being chased off by Nato aircraft, there is now the Eastern Sentry mission patrolling skies and the Baltic Sea.

Member states’ committed assets include Denmark, France and Germany supplying fighter jets, while the UK is contributing Typhoons, and Czechia helicopters. Naval and other air-defence capabilities are also being shored up.

Fragmented responses, exposed vulnerabilities

This early scrambling of resources highlights a fragmentation in European defence. “European defence is too divided, and in this area we need real coordination. It cannot be that one state on the eastern border does one thing and its neighbour something completely different. Russia will exploit every weakness,” an unnamed EU official told The Financial Times.

That critique has a practical edge: Poland’s largest exercise this year, Iron Defender, showcased US-made Patriot air-defence systems, HIMARS rocket artillery and a new integrated battle-management network — but did not run scenarios based on mass drone swarms.

“It is very important in these difficult and critical times for the world to know how Nato and Poland are prepared for different scenarios and different threats,” said Prime Minister Donald Tusk after observing the drills.

Tusk also said last week Poland would not hesitate to shoot down enemy aircraft that breach Polish airspace. It remains to be seen if Russia wants to test Tusk’s rhetoric.

The mix of technical, financial and political issues frames the EU initiative as both an industrial project and a test of collective will. Commission officials are not proposing a single pan-EU weapons system ready overnight. Their documents and public statements signal a two-track approach: pool money to co-finance procurement and development, and import operational lessons from Ukraine and allied partners to build a layered, cost-effective anti-drone architecture.

That architecture could combine high-end and low-cost elements: radar and electro-optical sensors to detect targets at distance, acoustic networks and other specialised sensors to find small signature drones closer in, hard-kill options where necessary, and soft-kill tools such as jamming and disruption to limit swarms without using expensive interceptors.

The Commission’s emphasis on instruments such as SAFE and the European Defence Fund is intended to accelerate that mix by lowering national budget hurdles and creating common industrial lines.

Polish political confusion

Meanwhile, in Poland at least, the operational confusion has also become political.

The destruction of a house in the village of Wyryki during the September 10 drone raid has reignited conflict between the Tusk government and President Karol Nawrocki after the newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported that an internal security source believed the damage resulted from a stray AIM-120 missile fired by a Polish F-16, not from a crashed Russian drone.

Nawrocki’s camp accused the government of lying to the public about what hit the house.

“All responsibility for the damage to the house in Wyryki falls on the authors of the drone provocation, Russia, that is,” Tusk wrote in social media in response.

For Poland — the only EU and Nato country to have land borders with Russia, its ally Belarus and war-torn Ukraine — the calculus is immediate: how to defend against cheap, numerous drones without scrambling jets and exhausting missile stocks against what might turn out to be styrofoam decoys sent to engage defences. That was the case of the recent attack.

The other challenge is how to integrate new sensors and command systems and how to square urgent operational needs with procurement rules and industrial politics. That would also include fast-tracking domestic drone-manufacturing capacity.

As Brussels is offering money and co-ordination and Kyiv is offering tested systems and expertise, Poland and other EU and Nato countries facing Russia directly now need to turn both into an effective shield before another large-scale raid tests Europe’s defences again.