From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / September 11, 2025
How a Sleepless Night in Poland Changed Everything – The Day Europe Woke Up to a New Kind of War
The Dawn of a New Reality – September 10, 2025
At 6:45 AM Warsaw time, Polish air defenses shot down the last Russian drone over their territory. The sun was rising on a Europe that had fundamentally changed overnight. For the first time since World War II, NATO forces had opened fire on Russian military assets—not in some distant theater, but in the skies above a member nation’s homeland. As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk would tell his parliament hours later, “The situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II.” By day’s end, Poland had invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, Russia was denying everything, and Europe had pledged €6 billion for an unprecedented drone war that was now quite literally hitting home.
The Debris Fields Tell Their Story
Across the Polish countryside, farmers and police officers spent September 10 picking through twisted metal and electronics scattered in fields from the Baltic coast to the Czech border. In the village of Czosnówka, 60 kilometers from Ukraine, officers cordoned off a crash site at 5:40 AM. Near Łódź, 260 kilometers from the nearest fighting, locals stared at drone fragments that had somehow traveled deeper into NATO territory than anyone thought possible.
The mathematics of the violation were staggering. Nineteen separate drone incursions in a single night—more than triple the total number of projectiles that had fallen on Polish soil during the entire war. Polish officials confirmed their forces, working alongside Dutch F-35s and Italian surveillance planes, had successfully intercepted at least three, possibly four, of the intruders. But sixteen had gotten through, crashing or being shot down across three provinces in what amounted to the largest foreign military operation on Polish soil since 1939.
In Wyryki village, near the Ukrainian border, 73-year-old Anna Kowalczyk surveyed the damage to her roof where a drone had struck during the night. “I thought it was thunder,” she told local reporters. “Then I saw the hole in my roof and the metal pieces in my garden. My neighbor said it was Russian. I asked him, ‘Russian what?’ He said, ‘Russian war, Anna. The war is here now.’”
Moscow’s Midnight Calculations
The attack had been no accident of war. Intelligence analysts poring over flight patterns on September 10 concluded that many drones had entered Polish airspace from Belarus—not Ukraine—suggesting coordination between Moscow and Minsk despite frantic denials from both capitals. Even more telling, several drones appeared to have been programmed to fly toward Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, the sprawling facility in southeastern Poland that serves as NATO’s primary pipeline for weapons flowing to Ukraine.
Ukrainian electronic warfare expert Serhiy Beskrestnov made a chilling discovery among the wreckage: at least some of the drones were Gerbera decoy models, specifically designed not to destroy targets but to overwhelm air defenses. Worse, he had documented Russian drones carrying Polish SIM cards in recent months—evidence that Moscow had been preparing this operation since summer, methodically testing the routes their metal messengers would follow into the heart of Europe.
Voice of Ukraine 