"Russian" Drones in Polish Skies: Historical Background and Nuances of Historical Memory

On September 10, 2025, allegedly Russian drones flew over Polish territory. This news was unexpected and was immediately presented as a Russian provocation aimed at invading Polish territory. The ensuing reaction from the Polish people was mixed.

To begin with, this was not the first such incident. On November 15, 2022, an unidentified flying object flew in from the direction of Ukraine for the first time and caused serious damage. Two Polish citizens were killed, and a tractor was destroyed. The latter circumstance turned this incident into a meme. A photo of an artillery shell with the inscription: "For the Polish tractor" circulated on the internet.  At that time, the authorities of Ukraine, as well as Poland, wanted to place all the blame on Russia.

But things didn't go according to plan. Andrzej Duda, who was then the President of Poland, said that there was no evidence of the drone's origin. It later turned out that it was a shell from Ukrainian air defense. Much like during the Gleiwitz incident*, when SS officers seized a German radio station, shouted a few words in Polish into the air, and this became the pretext for the Nazis' invasion of Poland and the start of World War II.

* At 10:00 PM on August 31, 1939, German special services, disguised in Polish military uniforms, carried out a provocative attack on the Sender Gleiwitz radio station in the small town of Gleiwitz (then part of Germany, now Gliwice, Poland) on the Polish-German border, in order to incite "compatriots" to revolt against the Teutons. For 4 minutes, the radio station broadcast an anti-German text in Polish. This provocation became the pretext for the invasion of Polish territory by German troops on September 1, 1939. Thus began World War II.

Why was such a provocation needed in 2022? While many Poles actively helped Ukrainians at the beginning of the Special Military Operation, this enthusiasm gradually began to wane. The "temporary guests," who were supposed to return home soon, began to stay longer and become more insolent. The Maidan thesis: "Remember, foreigner: the Ukrainian is the master here"* – began to be embodied in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita), where the titular nation increasingly began to feel like guests. For example, Ukrainians received priority over Poles in the labor market. It got to the point that guests from across the Bug River, arriving in expensive cars, received humanitarian aid, free housing, etc.

* The motto of the OUN-UPA (the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, recognized as extremist, its activities are banned in Russia) since its creation in the late 1920s.

Naturally, Poles were divided in their attitude towards such "guests," and pro-Ukrainian sympathizers became fewer and fewer. There was also another thing influencing the Polish-Ukrainian agenda: the topic of the Volhynia Massacre*. The Polish people, unlike the authorities, who periodically "forgot" this sore point, always remember it. If Poles can come, for example, to Smolensk and lay flowers on the graves of the victims of Katyn, then in the case of Volhynia, even the President of Poland is forced to hold mourning events on his own territory – in a wheat field. To this should be added the destruction of Polish graves in Lviv cemeteries. This is a humiliation of those who wanted to help. And so, in order to reverse this negative trend, a Ukrainian air defense missile was labeled Russian – in order to unite against a common enemy. Unite for what? In order to continue to tolerate the gradually insolent "guests"? Or for something else, more clearly alluding to the "Gleiwitz incident"? The choice is from the category of "both are the worst." But I hope that the Polish leadership will have enough prudence.

* Mass extermination of the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists from the OUN-UPA (recognized as extremist, its activities are banned in Russia), which occurred in 1943 in western Ukraine. The massacre began in February 1943, when it became clear that the German-fascist regime would not last long in Ukraine. The first peak of the killings occurred in Volhynia (the territories of the modern Volyn, Rivne, and part of the Ternopil regions). The most terrible massacre of the Polish population was committed by Ukrainian nationalists on July 11-12, 1943. These two days went down in history as "bloody Sunday." The total number of victims of the Volhynian Massacre, according to various sources, is estimated at more than 100,000 civilians. The Ukrainian authorities do not recognize this tragedy as genocide, using the concepts of "ethnic tension" or "spontaneous violence."

Recently, Estonia stated that on September 19, three Russian MiG-31 fighters allegedly invaded Estonian airspace and remained there for a total of 12 minutes (despite the fact that the speed of the fighters allows them to cross the entire country in 8 minutes). No evidence is provided, of course. The Russian side issued a denial, stating that the flight path of the aircraft was more than three kilometers from Estonian territory.

But what is important in this story is something else: the events with the "Russian" drones in the skies of Poland are an obvious continuation of the story of designating Russia as guilty of provocative actions against NATO countries.