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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

This is significant but also in line with standard Russian behavior as we know it from the last century; they will push as long and as far as they can. Zero respect for normal diplomatic relations or smaller nations. The entire eastern half of Europe has plenty of experience with this.

There need to be some reprisals for this incursion, otherwise more Shaheds will "arrive" by "bad luck", of course.

A no-fly zone over a stretch of Western Ukraine, enforced by NATO air power, would be in place. Manned Russian aircraft don't operate there, only drones and missiles.

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There is absolutely no chance that this was not exactly as planned.

One _could_ argue that GPS jamming by the Ukrainian forces is getting better at confusing Russian's systems — but I do agree in principle that this most likely part of the Russian plan.

You could argue that, but it isn't very plausible. These are not passive devices that operate autonomously.

Again — I think it was intentional. But for the

> These are not passive devices that operate autonomously

My understanding was that these are autonomous drones? Or rather — they have their route programmed before launch but then it's not remotely controlled.

> My understanding was that these are autonomous drones?

Not this particular model. They can be left without operator attention for a while but they will fly where they're told to fly and can change their flight path during a mission.

These are both. Shaheds/Gerbera used to be autonomous mission-based with baked flight paths, now they sometimes have cameras and internet.

Sure, but over Belarus their guidance and comms are not jammed. So either they were autonomous and not jammed when they flew into Polish airspace or they were guided and flew there on purpose. The 'unguided but jammed' combination does not work for the flightpath that they took.

BTW, they can be taken over post launch as a rule, this is one of the things that makes them a bit harder to take down, they don't follow a predictable trajectory and can react whilst underway. There are also jet powered versions that are a lot faster that are harder still to take down. The ones over Poland this morning all seem to be the prop based ones. There is also talk of at least one missile.

Two of the downed drones were on pretty reasonable path to fling back into Ukraine.

https://x.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1965668064865013884

Thanks, that provides useful context.

We don't see into the Russians' heads, but it would be very advantageous for them to be able to close the Rzeszów airport (a major NATO logistics hub in eastern Poland) for hours by sending a few cheap "oh, certainly jammed" drones in its direction.

They absolutely, under no circumstances, can be allowed to gain such capability to deny NATO/Poland its own operations on its own territory at will.

A no-fly zone 100 km into Ukrainian territory is a way to prevent them from trying this again.

> A no-fly zone 100 km into Ukrainian territory

No-fly zone should include Belarus and I would argue even Kaliningrad

Previously crashed drones were found with Polish SIM-cards in their 4G modems.

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