The Economist: Russia has occasionally strayed into airspace of NATO allies for decades

TALLINN - For decades, Russia has occasionally strayed into the national airspace of NATO allies, but airspace violations have approximately doubled in the past year, according to a Western official, The Economist writes.

The publication notes that the breach of Estonian airspace was the most egregious such incursion in that country in more than 20 years. Furthermore, the drone barrage into Poland was the largest transgression in the alliance’s 76-year history.

Until this year NATO had invoked Article 4, a clause which triggers consultations among the alliance’s 32 members, only seven times in its history. Now it has been invoked twice in two weeks, first by Poland and then by Estonia.

According to The Economist, in the incident on Sept. 19, Italy, Finland and Sweden scrambled fighter jets to meet the three Russian planes, which acknowledged the intercept with a wing-wave but did not communicate over radio or change course.

The drone incidents are much murkier. On Sept. 22, Copenhagen and Oslo airports briefly shut after drones were spotted in and around their airspace.

"There can be no doubt that everything points to this being the work of a professional actor. This is what I would define as a hybrid attack," said Troels Lund Poulsen, Denmark’s defense minister.

According to the publication, Western officials do not know why Russia has ramped up its poking and prodding. Some allies believe that both the Polish and Estonian incidents were accidental, a function of Russian sloppiness rather than malfeasance, though Poland strongly disagrees.

For much of the war to date, Vladimir Putin’s campaign of subversion was intended to intimidate Europe into reducing its aid to Ukraine and to deter it from expanding that support with more and new types of weapons, such as tanks, jets and long-range missiles. In that, Putin was unsuccessful, The Economist writes.

But the recent Russian actions are probably aimed at driving wedges between Europe and America, and among European NATO members themselves. Russian incursions create the impression that Europe is unable to protect its airspace, undermining public confidence in governments.

According to the publication, they also expose the fact that Donald Trump has little appetite to back his European partners in a moment of crisis. And they accentuate Europe’s internal splits over how to respond.

In practice, many allies want to tread carefully. Maj. Gen. Jonas Wikman, the head of the Swedish Air Force, whose jets were among those that responded to the Estonian incursion, says that he has the delegated authority to shoot down Russian planes if needed.

"But we will always refer to the threat level," he adds. "When we talk about Swedish territory, we talk about proportionality."

In the Estonian incident, NATO was able to track the Russian incursion throughout and the intruders, though armed with air-to-air missiles, posed no apparent threat to the ground.

On paper, each ally has the right to shoot down whatever it likes; it need not wait for permission from NATO. The problem is a political rather than military one. If Russia chose to escalate in response, one concern is that Trump would stand back and that Europeans would squabble among themselves over how far to back the ally that had blown up a Russian aircraft.

According to the publication, however, NATO allies all agree that the status quo is becoming untenable.