Polish foreign minister urges West to establish no-fly zone over Ukraine following drone incursions

In the wake of last week’s Russian drone incursions into Polish and Romanian airspace, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski has called for NATO and the EU to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine to prevent further breaches of European skies.

“If you ask me personally, I think we should consider it”, Sikorski told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Sunday. “Technically, we as NATO and the EU would be capable of it, but this is not a decision that Poland can make alone, only with its allies”.

Speaking separately to The Kyiv Independent, Sikorski said that the unprecedented incursion of 19 Russian drones into Poland’s airspace last week had sparked fresh discussions on the potential establishment of a NATO-enforced no-fly zone over parts of Ukraine, adding that opinion among European leaders was “shifting towards this idea”.

Ukraine first appealed to NATO to establish a no-fly zone to protect its citizens from Russian airstrikes in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion in 2022, but the alliance rejected the request on the grounds that doing so would escalate the war beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In an interview with The Guardian published on Monday, Sikorski also revealed that the Russian drones that entered Poland’s airspace were “all duds”, suggesting that Russia “tried to test us without starting a war”.

His remarks echoed those made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who called the subsequent violation of Romanian airspace by a Russian drone on Saturday an “obvious expansion of the war by Russia”.

“The Russian military knows exactly where their drones are headed and how long they can operate in the air. Their routes are always calculated. This cannot be a coincidence [or] a mistake,” Zelensky wrote on X.

After Romania summoned Russia’s ambassador in protest at the incursion, the Russian Embassy in Bucharest dismissed the incident as a “deliberate provocation” by Ukraine, which it accused of trying to “draw other European states into a dangerous military adventure”.

Meanwhile, as Warsaw moves to bolster its defences, Polish President Karol Nawrocki on Sunday signed a decree authorising the deployment of NATO troops in the country as part of the alliance’s newly announced Eastern Sentry mission, which aims to strengthen security along NATO’s eastern flank.