Polish Operational Command has dispatched a military helicopter to verify a suspected violation of Polish airspace by an unidentified object approaching from the direction of Belarus, the command stated on Friday.
Announcing the activity, the Operational Command of the Armed Forces Branches said the work is being conducted through the Air Operations Centre and Air Component Command, and involves checking radar system records covering the area.
It said: “Due to suspicion of a violation of the airspace of the Republic of Poland by an unidentified object approaching from the direction of Belarus, the Operational Command of the Armed Forces Branches, through the Air Operations Centre and Air Component Command, is conducting verification activities. As part of the verification of radar system records in the area, a military helicopter has been dispatched.”
The command was careful to set out what it does not yet know. It said: “The ongoing actions aim to confirm the nature of the registered object and rule out, among other possibilities, that the registered signal was the result of meteorological phenomena or anomalies.”
It added that no activity by Russian long-range aviation connected to strikes on targets in Ukraine had been observed in recent hours, that the situation is being continuously monitored, and that further information will follow once verification is complete and the details of the incident confirmed.
The reference to weather is not a throwaway line, though, as Radar returns can be generated by temperature inversions, precipitation, flocks of birds and a range of atmospheric conditions, and a command that scrambles aircraft every time a return appears will exhaust its crews and its credibility in short order.
A great many of the airspace incidents Poland has dealt with over the past three years have occurred during Russian strike packages against western Ukraine, when Polish and allied aircraft are launched as a precaution and objects periodically stray across the border. The absence of that activity means whatever was registered is unlikely to be a strayed cruise missile or a drone drifting off course from an ongoing attack.
Poland has repeatedly scrambled aircraft in response to Russian strikes on Ukraine, and objects have crossed into Polish territory on several occasions, including a missile that killed two people at Przewodów in November 2022, which was subsequently assessed as a Ukrainian air defence round.
The direction of approach carries its own significance of couyrse as Belarus hosts Russian forces and has been the origin of a range of hybrid activity directed at Poland, including the sustained pressure on the border through organised migration since 2021, and Polish forces maintain a substantial presence along that frontier.
‘PiS, the nationalist-libertarian Confederation, Grzegorz Braun’s radical Confederation of the Polish Crown and Development Plus, led by former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, receive a combined 47.1%. The liberal, centrist and left-wing field attracts around 43% across six parties.’
Worth keeping an eye on polling for the 2027 election in Poland. Braun’s party, potential ‘king makers’ on the right, are pro Russian, quite possibly recipients, directly or indirectly, of Russian funding. That would drive a coach and horses through NATO’s land/air deterrent in Central/Eastern Europe.
This probably isn’t going to help either:
‘Alternative for Germany (AfD) took at least 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in the ex-communist east, according to exit polls published by broadcasters ARD and ZDF.
The anti-immigration and Moscow-friendly party is now on the brink of becoming the first hard-Right party to run a state government in Germany since the Second World War.’
If Poland and Germany are wobbly, Italy and Spain not interested, Britain unable to meet its commitment to two deployable divisions, where does that leave the NATO land/air conventional deterrent on Continental Europe?
France?
Every party the mushy EU centre dont like is labelled as “pro Russian”, usually without a shred of evidence
Ive never mmet a Pole who is pro russian
‘At a recent meeting in the city of Szczecin, Braun appeared on stage alongside Mateusz Piskorski, a former member of parliament who is accused by Polish prosecutors of spying on behalf of Russia and China.
Braun declared that it was his “dream” for people like Piskorski to stand as parliamentary candidates for his Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP) party at elections.
Piskorski, who between 2005 and 2007 was an MP representing the populist Self-Defence (Samoobrona) party, is known for his sympathetic views towards Russia. That is highly unusual in Poland, where animosity towards Russia is almost universal among the general public and political parties.
In 2014, Piskorski acted as the head of a group of “independent” observers allowed to oversee Russia’s referendum to annex Ukraine. Afterwards, Piskorski said that the referendum had been “conducted in accordance with the law” with “no violations of generally accepted standards”.
Braun himself has long been accused of having sympathies towards and links to Russia. In 2019, Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish daily, published photos of Braun in Moscow the previous year meeting with Leonid Sviridov, a Russian journalist expelled from Poland in 2015 on suspicion of espionage.
In November, Braun and fellow KKP politicians wrote to Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov calling for a “normalisation in Polish-Russian relations”. OKO.press notes that, during his recent political activity, Braun has been “openly collaborating with pro-Russian figures”.’