The Grey Zone Breaks: Europe Confronts a War Without Borders

Before dawn in Poland, drones pierced roofs and airspace. Jets scrambled, airports halted, NATO consulted. Europe’s skies revealed a new front, low, deniable, relentless and dangerously normalising.

It began before dawn in the eastern Polish village of Wyryki-Wola, where an elderly man was downstairs with the television on, listening to updates about a strange night sky. At 6:30 a.m., as he would later recount, a drone tore through the roof of his two-storey brick house, splintering rafters and strewing debris across the bedroom above. “It needs to be demolished,” Tomasz Wesolowski told reporters¹, his words as blunt as the hole that opened his home to the weather. The same morning, Polish aircrews were already in the air with F-16 fighter jets scrambling alongside Dutch F-35s, Italian AWACS circling to stitch the picture together, NATO refuelling tankers keeping the patrols aloft. Nineteen objects, Poland said, had crossed into its airspace during a large Russian strike on Ukraine. Those that posed a threat were shot down. It was 10 September, and for the first time in this war a NATO member had fired in active defence.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk told parliament it was “the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two,” while adding he had “no reason to believe we’re on the brink of war.”

A blackened patch in a southeastern field marked where another device had fallen, the char an inkblot of uncertainty.