Yes, they had. ACLED reports[0] that it occurred 50 times since 2022, and 4 of them had already been in Poland. It just never became a huge news piece until September, that's exactly what I mean.
0: https://acleddata.com/expert-comment/acled-data-show-least-5...
"mostly crashes of Russian and Ukrainian stray drones and missiles"
The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays or crashes.
> The recent incident in Poland and Romania was drones that were not strays
We don't actually know this do we? The report states that the technology to push drones off their intended path has been ramped up significantly.
Proof points:
- the drones that made it into Poland did not have warheads
- they flew over Belarus before entering Polish airspace
- they were under continuous control from the moment of launch
- they were prepped with longer range tanks than they would have had if they had been aimed at Ukraine
- quite a few of them were equipped with ways of sending back telemetry
So no, these were not strays. The best explanation is that they were an intel gathering mission with respect to the kind of response generated and the speed with which they were detected. Other possible uses for russia are to misdirect attention from wherever they might want to attack for real (say, the Baltics) and a way to reduce the flow of defensive measures to Ukraine by instilling fear in the population further West.
1. Imagine: Your are Russia, are you going to launch drones with the fuel to fly not only into Ukraine, but also all across the map of Poland? Or do you dedicate that space to bigger warheads. Or lighter drones to increase their speed. That alone answers your question.
2. The drones found crashed, has modifications like bladdertank in the warhead section to increase their fuel. You do not accidentally get a drone all the way to Gdansk without increasing its fuel load. See point 1 again ...
3. Having a drone gone stray is not uncommon, but there is a difference between 1 going stray and 20 going stay. Your argument about jamming is flawed by the simply fact that we have the path the drones took, and unless Ukraine magically got the exact same drone misdirecting tech, active on multiple paths, again, check the map. See the issue there?
4. If the drones got jammed / flight spoofed, why did they not fly in a erratic course. You expect a drone that has its course altered to to suddenly start flying in different path.
5. The drone paths again, if the drone left the jamming or misdirection area, it will try to get back to to its intended area. They did not do so.
6. If this tech worked so great, why did we not have more mass drones flying in the wrong direction the following days? Drone attacks happen every day in Ukraine, they are not one off events. If the Ukrainians got this tech to work so good, to send 20 drones into Poland, why no repeat? You do not fix a flaw that the enemy found in just one day. Did Russia ground its drones the next day, the next week until they fix the issue? Added more antenna's and more hardware to make it harder to jam/redirect? No, they continue they typical pattern.
7. ... insert conspiracy that it was all planned and they do not use that tech again to not over use it (while giving the Russians time to adjust their hardware???). Sigh ...
People posting this nonsense that NATO is looking for a war or to ramp up incidents. Here is a simple answer: Who attack first? Was it NATO? Was not Ukraine? No ... Russia invaded a country for the SECOND TIME, triggering this mess.
You claim financial motives to trump up rhetoric ... our arms industries can already not keep up with the orders. We have backlogs that will take 10+ years to fill already, even with the expanding industry.
Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy but what else is new these days. Hate to tell ya, but the internet / social media is a battlefield these days, just as much as troops on the ground. Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic, its just a modern adaptation of old tactics. The new "remember we have nukes, we can get you", or the old USSR "see our planes flying into your identification zones"...
> Please use your mind a bit more and understand that those drones are not a new tactic
Where have I even claimed anything like this? Can you appreciate how it comes across to set up a strawman and begin with "please use your mind a bit?" It's incredibly condescending and makes it difficult to take anything you've said seriously. I even made explicit reference to the repeated border tests on both sides over the past 30 years, and I linked to an independent body that showed how often it happens with drones. Did you just not read anything I wrote?
> Like always, some people are just too much into conspiracy ...
Are you really saying that neither Russia nor other state actors perform online misinformation campaigns? It only takes a second of research to see otherwise.