Russian drones and missiles are again hammering Ukraine’s power grid, and the shockwaves are now being felt inside NATO airspace. As Vladimir Putin’s forces push a renewed air campaign against Ukrainian cities and substations, allied jets are racing into the skies over Eastern Europe to make sure the war’s debris, misfires, or provocations do not spill across the border unchecked. The scramble is a reminder that every large strike package on Ukraine now doubles as a stress test of NATO’s promise to defend its own territory.
The latest barrage has forced NATO to fuse real-time air policing with longer term planning, tightening the seams between national air forces, shared radar pictures, and new defensive concepts. The alliance is not shooting down Russian weapons over Ukraine, but it is moving closer to the edge of the battlefield, tracking drones and missiles as they skim the frontier and preparing to react if even one crosses into allied skies.
Russia’s renewed strikes and Ukraine’s strained grid
Russia has resumed a combined missile and drone campaign aimed squarely at Ukrainian energy infrastructure, a strategy that seeks to sap both the country’s economy and its will to fight. Analysts tracking the conflict report that Russia has restarted large scale salvos against substations and power lines, part of what they describe as a broader offensive effort by Russia to pressure Ukrainian cities during the winter heating season. The pattern is familiar from earlier phases of the war, but the intensity of the latest waves suggests Moscow believes Ukraine’s air defenses and repair crews are more vulnerable after years of attrition.
The impact is immediate inside Ukraine’s homes and factories. After the latest hits on the grid, Ukraine has had to order emergency power cuts while nuclear power plants reduce output because of damage to substations and transmission lines. Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN’s atomic watchdog, has warned that this kind of repeated disruption to nuclear facilities and their supporting infrastructure carries its own safety risks, even when reactors remain under control. For ordinary Ukrainians, the result is rolling blackouts, stalled trams, and factories forced to idle just as the country tries to keep its war economy running.
Drone warfare, Starlink and Ukraine’s evolving defenses
On the front lines, Ukraine is trying to blunt Russia’s advantage in cheap, long range drones that can loiter over targets or slam into transformers and apartment blocks. Ukrainian officials say that earlier this week, on a Tuesday that saw one of the biggest strike waves of the war, Russia sent swarms of drones and missiles that left a cratered street in Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine. In response, Kyiv has been racing to expand electronic warfare, mobile air defense teams, and software that can fuse radar, acoustic sensors, and visual feeds into a single picture of the sky.
Part of that adaptation involves cutting off Russian access to communications tools that can guide or coordinate attacks. Ukrainian authorities have moved to pull the plug on Russian use of Starlink terminals inside occupied areas, arguing that the satellite network had been exploited to help direct drones and ground units. At the same time, they are investing in more resilient command links for their own unmanned systems, trying to ensure that Ukrainian drones can still operate even when Russian jamming is intense. The contest over connectivity and navigation is now as central to the air war as the physical interceptors that try to knock incoming drones out of the sky.
NATO’s Eastern Sentry and the new air policing reality
For NATO, the renewed Russian air campaign has validated a shift that was already underway along the alliance’s eastern flank. Earlier, after what officials described as an unprecedented Russian drone incursion that brushed close to allied territory, NATO moved to tighten its defenses from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The alliance’s planners concluded that slow, low flying drones and cruise missiles posed a different kind of challenge than the high altitude bombers of the Cold War, demanding more agile radar coverage and faster decision making.
That thinking crystallized in a new concept known as the Eastern Sentry defense plan, which aims to improve air and missile defenses along the eastern flank with Russia through better information sharing and new assets. Officials describe Eastern Sentry as a way to knit together national radar networks, ground based interceptors, and fighter patrols so that a drone crossing from Ukraine toward allied territory is detected and tracked in seconds, not minutes. A separate briefing on the plan stressed that NATO wants to move beyond ad hoc responses toward a standing posture that can handle repeated incursions without risking miscalculation.
Poland’s airspace scare and the politics of proximity
The latest Russian strikes on Ukraine have brought that posture into sharp focus in southeastern Poland, where civilian aviation has collided with military necessity. Authorities there temporarily suspended flight operations at Two airports in southeastern Poland on a Saturday as a precaution after Russian attacks across the border. Officials emphasized that there was no confirmed threat to Polish airspace, but they were not prepared to take chances while missiles and drones were flying just a short distance away.
Flight tracking data showed that airspace in southeast Poland was briefly closed because of what was described as unplanned military activity, a phrase that usually signals heightened operations by allied aircraft. Reporting from the scene noted that By Reuters, the disruption coincided with Russian strikes on power stations in western Ukraine, underscoring how closely linked the two airspaces have become. A separate account described how Polish Airports Reopen once the immediate risk had passed, but the episode left little doubt that every major Russian barrage now forces NATO capitals to weigh the safety of civilian flights against the need for rapid military reactions.
Hybrid threats on the flank and the risk of miscalculation
Even beyond missiles and drones, NATO’s eastern members are grappling with what they describe as hybrid tactics designed to probe and distract. In Lithuania and Poland, officials have complained about mysterious balloon flights drifting across their borders, objects that some in the region have nicknamed “flying cigarettes” because of their shape. These balloons have forced NATO member states to activate air defense protocols and scramble resources, revealing response times and coordination patterns that military planners would normally prefer to keep hidden.
Regional governments have accused Belarus of using these balloons as a form of hybrid warfare, a way to harass neighbors and gather intelligence without crossing the threshold into open conflict. The flights have prompted new discussions inside NATO about how to classify and respond to such ambiguous intrusions, especially when they occur alongside Russian military activity. In practice, that means more frequent alerts for air crews, more pressure on radar operators to distinguish between harmless objects and genuine threats, and a higher baseline of tension along borders that are already crowded with surveillance flights and patrols.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
