During a Russian missile attack on Ukraine, Polish radar picked up an unidentified object inside national airspace. Neither the American F-15s nor the Polish MiG-29s airborne nearby could identify it before it vanished from the screens. The wreckage surfaced only on 27 April 2023, when a horse rider found the remains of a Kh-55 cruise missile in a forest near Bydgoszcz in northern Poland — close to NATO's Joint Force Training Centre. The four-month gap, and the fact that radar had lost the missile entirely, caused a lasting political controversy in Warsaw.
GlobalMilitary.net's 2026 inventory snapshot shows nine NATO members — Iceland, Luxembourg, the three Baltic states, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia and Slovenia — hold no fixed-wing fighters, attack aircraft or bombers and depend on Allied air policing.
GlobalMilitary.net's incident log counts 45 established violations of European airspace between January 1 and August 16, 2026, against 31 for the whole of 2025 - and almost all of the growth sits in incidents that ended with a shootdown or an explosion on the ground.
An Italian Eurofighter on NATO Baltic Air Policing duty destroyed an unidentified drone over eastern Latvia before dawn on 14 August, the second time the alliance's quick-reaction force has shot one down over the country this year.