Russia is planning an armed “provocation” on Polish soil to test Nato’s resolve, the United States has warned.
Polish critical infrastructure could be targeted by missiles and drones or Russian soldiers could cross the border into Nato territory.
Washington has issued several warnings to Warsaw about the plot, sources close to Karol Nawrocki, the Polish president, told Onet, the Polish news outlet, which, along with The Telegraph, is owned by Axel Springer and is part of its Global Reporters Network.
Additional context:
The United States has warned Poland that Russia may be considering an armed provocation on Polish territory in the coming months to test NATO’s resolve and pressure Western allies to scale back support for Ukraine
According to Ukrainska Pravda, citing The Telegraph, sources close to Polish President Karol Nawrocki said Washington had warned Warsaw that Russia was weighing scenarios that could include drone attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power plants, or a simulated large-scale air attack designed to force Poland to activate its air defenses.
A more radical scenario could involve a hybrid attack in Poland’s border region, potentially with the participation of Belarusian forces. Russia could attempt to explain away a border violation by claiming its troops had become lost because of GPS disruption or were carrying out a rescue mission after a helicopter emergency.
Doubt.
I’m not sure what to think about it - a risk certainly exists, but I can’t put a probability on it currently.
I live in one of the countries which has been warned about a provocation - Estonia. Over here, we’ve been preparing for this at some kind of a pace (IMHO too slow) for quite some years. An admission must be made: both Ukraine and Russia are way ahead in mass production and use of drones. They both punch above their weight with drones (and both have considerable weight too) and have considerably more antidrone defense set up than neighbouring countries.
Russia manufactures an awful lots of drones per day. But as long as Ukraine fights it with an equally awful lot, Russia simply lacks resources for a big provocation, since Ukraine is tying down all their resources.
Russia has fuel shortages, manpower shortages, armor and artillery shortages, no surplus of drones either (they fly to Ukraine within days of leaving a factory). There could be a stockpile of 100 or 200 Iskander short range ballistic missiles, less of other types. On the background, of course, the Soviet-built strategic missile forces exist untouched. But they’re not capable of being used with conventional warheads, since their precision is too low.
Meanwhile, Putin’s popularity is finally dropping. Parliamentary elections are approaching. It’s fairly obviouls that special services must be considering “creative” ways of taking back initiative. But I can’t clearly see what they would hope to achieve with this kind of activity.
Hypothetic perspective from Russia: “let’s f*ck around and see if NATO has resolve”
- Option A: NATO does not have resolve, but Ukraine used the day to blow up another series of important industries
- Option B: oopsie, NATO does have resolve and just joined Ukraine in blowing up stuff
I don’t see a winning option.
Failing in Ukraine… so Russia will now also provoke a heavily armed NATO country, and neighbour to Ukraine: Poland.
No. Serious doubt this is real.
seems like lockheed martin wants to sell more weapons
“US Warns” is like, “ChatGPT said”.
It might be true. But it has no credibility and might be full of shit.
They had been right since Ukraine though. Nobody, except Ukraine of course, before the invasion believed the US warning because 1) invading a country that historically hates you and expecting no resistance is stupid. That’s like Britain invading Ireland again. 2) the US lied about Iraq before. I hate to say this as someone who loathe US for invading Iraq under falsified intelligence report, but this time the US intelligence is telling the truth. Broken clock is right twice a day and all that while also the US is the boy who cried wolf.
This news is the usual border movement and sabre rattling from Kremlin to compensate from the fact that they are proven to be paper tiger. All bark and no bite. It’s like Kevin Hart wanting to fight Andre the Giant because Kevin feels so insecure.
There’s a difference in credibility between trying to make excuses for attacking versus sharing intelligence for defence though.
If the story was that Iran was preparing to attack Poland to support Russia and that’s why the US started their illegal clusterfuck, then yeah that would be completely different.
Except the US and Poland are not trying to make excuses to attack Russia?
…
that’s literally exactly what I’m saying.
Of course it’s true, the US planning false flag attacks and announcing them early is literally the history of half of modern terror attacks.
This mildly concerns me because I’ve had a paranoid thought that the orange turd has been planning to announce the official US withdrawal from NATO on July 4th.
Not to say Poland and the other NATO allies couldn’t handle a deeply weakened Russian military but no idea what downstream effects this may have
NATO without the US would most likely be still strong enough to face Russia. This is assuming the US just sits out and doesn’t become an antagonist in some fashion.
Oh shit… I never thought about that.
It’s the same shit Germany pulled before WW2. If we’d have had a different president we’d have been aligned with Germany.
Either way we were going to wait and watch and jump in with the winners.
NATOs resolve? Putin had better hope we can all hold Poland back from finally acting on what has been the burning national desire to turn Russians into a fine pink mist.
screeching intensifies
“What was that?”
“Oh that’s just Poland daring Russia to push the button…”
We won’t hold Poland back. We’ll be right there, shoulder by shoulder!
Kyiv Post tends to be a little less bombastic with their reporting:
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/79532
They word it differently, saying the US warned that Russia was “considering” an attack. This is probably true, and has probably been true every year for the past several decades. Simply because a nation’s military planners “consider” pretty much everything they can think of.
Thanks. Updated the post to include Kyiv’s perspective.
“The US government says” a lot of crazy shit. Russia doesnt have the oil or cash reserves, or troops or hardware to initiate an attack on NATO. I imagine its the US spreading fear for its own advantage before the NATO meeting.
Now i’m no military expert but even I know out of all the possible ideas Russia could have, this is the worst.
Poland is quite literally chomping at the bit for the ruskies to try something. They’ve been prepping for it for god knows how long now. The Polish Military would absolutely kick the russians teeth in on their own without the need of NATO if it called for it.
russians are stupid but this is just posturing. empty threats. For the decades of russian lying they’ve never been able to get good at it. like someone who has been playing the piano for years but still can’t play twinkle, twinkle, little star…at some point you just need to tell them “stop, you’re not good at it, and you never will be.”
I genuinely thought about 3 years ago that Poland was going to join the war, with or without consent of Nato on the side of Ukraine. From their pov, they won’t get an opportunity to hurt Russia as much as it would now in the next 50 years at least. If this was a game and no actual lives were at stake, or if Russia had no nukes, they would have pulled that trigger already.
That being said, if sufficiently provoked, I don’t expect them to sit idly by. From a geostrategic pov it might actually be necessary for them to secure their eastern flank, given that Germany is rearming and afd is very friendly to the Kremlin.
Then EU members should leak that they’re considering taking Kaliningrad.
du hast königsberg und deutschland falsch geschrieben
*Královec
Germans really can’t stop themselves
Königsberg… i say we should take as EUs common land… it has a good military port after all.
oopsie woopsie… yeah deal
Shouldn’t trust the word of Russian sympathizers but it wouldn’t hurt to be on guard just in case.
Poland will mop up the floor with what’s left of his troops. He’d be fucking stupid to even try. Makes me wonder if he’s spreading this rumor via his puppets for some other reason-- and it most definitely has something to do with Ukraine.
Poland like “try me”
Doubt it. Even Putin knows not to check for electricity by pissing on the fuse box.
Considering how badly they seem to be doing in Ukraine, this seems like a fairly large tactical error.
Putin needs to mobilize the Russian populace to make any progress in Ukraine, but doing so would make the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg revolt. He needs a damn good reason. If he doesn’t mobilize, Moscow and St. Petersburg are going to revolt, and he’s going to end his days hanging from a lamppost.
We can but hope
- Provoke NATO into conflict
- Blame NATO joining conflict for having to end conflict
“Why would NATO do this?”
Oh that’s interesting. And plausible.
