Russia is planning an armed “provocation” on Polish soil to test Nato’s resolve, the United States has warned.
Polish critical infrastructure could be targeted by missiles and drones or Russian soldiers could cross the border into Nato territory.
Washington has issued several warnings to Warsaw about the plot, sources close to Karol Nawrocki, the Polish president, told Onet, the Polish news outlet, which, along with The Telegraph, is owned by Axel Springer and is part of its Global Reporters Network.
Additional context:
The United States has warned Poland that Russia may be considering an armed provocation on Polish territory in the coming months to test NATO’s resolve and pressure Western allies to scale back support for Ukraine
According to Ukrainska Pravda, citing The Telegraph, sources close to Polish President Karol Nawrocki said Washington had warned Warsaw that Russia was weighing scenarios that could include drone attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power plants, or a simulated large-scale air attack designed to force Poland to activate its air defenses.
A more radical scenario could involve a hybrid attack in Poland’s border region, potentially with the participation of Belarusian forces. Russia could attempt to explain away a border violation by claiming its troops had become lost because of GPS disruption or were carrying out a rescue mission after a helicopter emergency.
From the article this seems less like opening a full-on front in conception and more like a teehee wow our drone seems to have gotten turned around and flew into a substation sort of provocation. An unambiguous invasion will activate more or less everyone but relatively piddly incursions don’t typically excite as much of the population because many away from the area tend to see the cost of war as worse than the cost of tolerating those incursions. So ironically a well-calibrated attack in this gray zone kind of way that falls just short of the line can actually divide people in the victim country rather than unite them, and if a particular sort of incursion is tolerated once then it’s not a far step for Russia to keep spamming that out and take advantage of the additional flexibility. I think that the former is more of the goal because there is a burgeoning division in Polish society on aiding Ukraine or not that Russia is trying to make as wide as possible, things get much more dire for Ukraine if Polish help is cut.
Every once in a while Russia does screw up with where the line is (ex. when Turkey blew up a jet they were flying over Turkish territory) but even in that case where they did get a vigorous response they kind of won anyway because it drove a big wedge between Turkey and the rest of NATO. Then isolated and threatened-feeling Turkey sought to improve relations with Moscow and among other things actually started officially allowing Russian jets to fly over their territory to Syria, up until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.