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Drones, jets and a closed border in Europe
Summary
A look back at a day of airspace alarms on NATO's eastern flank, two days after Poland sealed its border with Belarus.
What did NATO's eastern flank look like on 13 September 2025? It looked like a region on alert, with fighter jets in the air and an airport shut once again.
On that day a Russian drone breached Romanian airspace, and NATO forces scrambled fighter jets in response. In eastern Poland, Lublin Airport was closed for the second time that week because of the threat of Russian drones.
A border already shut
The alarms came two days after Poland, on 11 September 2025, closed its border with Belarus indefinitely and deployed 40,000 troops to it. Warsaw cited security concerns over Russian–Belarusian military exercises near the region, the first such exercises since 2022.
Taken together, the reports from those days show allied states in the east reacting on several fronts at once: a border closed and reinforced in Poland, a civilian airport suspended in the same country, and a drone incursion into Romania that brought a military response. The events were part of a pattern of violations of non-combatant airspace during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
