| Date | 8 Sep 2025 |
| Tracker | European Airspace Violations |
| Type | Incursion |
| Location |
Polatycze, Poland
52.05, 23.60 (approximate) |
An unarmed drone bearing Cyrillic markings crashed at Polatycze, near the Belarus–Poland border. No attribution was established. Markings alone are treated here as an indication rather than proof: decoy drones are routinely built to be mistaken for something else, and both Russian and Ukrainian machines have been recovered carrying misleading identifiers.
| Date | Type | Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Russian drone fragments identified near Plauru after initial denial |
| 4 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Two Russian drones monitored inside Polish airspace |
| 9 Sep 2025 | Interception | NATO shoots down Russian drones in the largest incursion into Poland |
| 13 Sep 2025 | Incursion | Russian drone tracked for 50 minutes over Romanian airspace |
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.