Sitting across each other at a table in New York, Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio smiled for the cameras as their teams began a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly early on Wednesday morning. There was much to talk about between Russia’s foreign minister and the U.S. secretary of state. Not least an incident a couple of hours earlier, in which a Russian military helicopter strayed across a border and into NATO’s airspace.
It is the latest provocation in a chain that has seen alleged Russian hybrid attacks taking place across allied NATO territory, including high-risk sabotage plots, that many European capitals fear is a prelude to a major Kremlin test of Article 5’s credibility. Such a test of NATO’s commitment to collective defense would be a gamble with potentially catastrophic consequences. For now, Russia is operating in a murky grey zone, obscuring its involvement and giving itself enough room for plausible deniability.
That may be the color of its move against NATO, should it choose to. Not a clear and direct attack, but one that can be explained away as an accident, or a defensive response, or a strike of sufficient vagueness in origin that invoking Article 5 is not the obvious answer. The latest incident was reported by Polish military command as having taken place over its border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad this morning, around 11:08 a.m. local time there.
Polish officials described it as a “brief violation” of the airspace by a Russian Mi-8 military helicopter, lasting around 42 seconds and penetrating 300 meters, before returning to its own skies above Kaliningrad. Fighter jets were scrambled and ground-based forces put on standby. Poland was clear that this is a signal from Moscow.
Otherwise, Russia will continue its risky probing to work out where those red lines for itself, on the assumption that U.S.-led NATO is too unsure, too disunited, or plain too weak to carve them in the ground. Clarity and credibility will help avoid a miscalculation—like a stray Russian helicopter shot down by NATO's air defenses—that would be a disaster for everyone.
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