By AFP and Kontur | 2025-08-22

Poland said on Wednesday that a Russian military drone flew into its airspace and exploded in farmland in the east of the country overnight, calling it a "provocation."

"Once again, we are facing a provocation from the Russian Federation, with a Russian drone," Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters.

The explosion occurred in a cornfield near the village of Osiny some 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Warsaw and near the borders with Ukraine and Russian-allied Belarus.

Officials said there were no casualties but the windows of some nearby houses were blown out.

The minister said it came at "a particular moment, where peace talks are underway, where there is hope that this war... has a chance to end. Russia provokes once again."

Poland has been a major supporter of Ukraine, hosts over a million Ukrainian refugees and is a key transit point for Western humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski condemned "a new violation of our airspace from the east."

"The foreign ministry will protest to the perpetrator of this violation," he wrote on X.

Polish media published a video showing an explosion during the night, and photos of debris including an engine and a propeller.

Polish general Dariusz Malinowski said the aircraft "was a decoy drone, which was not armed but carried a self-destruct warhead."

Russian drones and missiles have crossed into the airspace of NATO members Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania several times in the three and a half years since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

"Russia has repeatedly violated NATO airspace, and this time Poland was the target... We must expand the operational capabilities of the Polish Armed Forces and anti-drone systems," Kosiniak-Kamysz said.

The Polish military had earlier said that they had not detected any airspace violations overnight.

Lithuania closes airspace

The latest incident comes less than a month after Russian military drones flew into Lithuania from Kremlin-allied Belarus.

An unarmed Gerbera-type drone used by Russia entered Lithuania on July 10, prompting some Lithuanian officials to be taken to a bomb shelter.

A second Gerbera-type drone, armed with explosives, entered the country from Belarus on July 28 and crashed at a military training area after flying over parts of the country's capital, Vilnius.

On Thursday, Lithuania's Defense Ministry said it had closed airspace along parts of the Belarus border, a measure in effect since August 13 and set to last until October 1. The move comes ahead of the Zapad-2025 joint Belarusian-Russian military exercises scheduled for September.

"This was done taking into account the security situation and threats to society, including risks to civil aviation posed by unmanned aircraft violating airspace," the defiance ministry told the Baltic News Service, adding that the measure will allow the country's military to respond to airspace violations.

The ban could be extended "if the threat of unmanned aerial vehicles entering the Lithuanian airspace did not decrease."

Uladzimir Zhyhar, a representative of BelPol -- a group of former Belarusian security officials opposing President Alyaksandr Lukashenka -- told Kontur earlier this month that Lukashenka and Russia's Vladimir Putin see Zapad-2025 as a test of NATO's response, and did not rule out "small drone flights" into NATO territory to gauge the reaction.