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Antifake / Factcheck

Today

Drone incursion into Poland — a NATO provocation? We take on the question posed by a Polish lawmaker and a Belarusian Telegram channel

The speculation was fueled by the British broadcaster Sky News.

Authors:
Editors:
Fake appearance date: 14.09.2025
The drone attack on Poland was a coordinated NATO provocation, according to a post on the Telegram channel “ZhS Premium.” Its authors compared the timing of the drones entering Polish airspace with the departure of a NATO airplane  from the Netherlands to assist Polish forces. The Weekly Top Fake team investigated where the contradictions in this story came from.

On September 14, 2025, the Telegram channel “ZhS Premium” published a post about the drone incursion into Polish territory on the night of the 10th:

“A member of the Polish Sejm and president of the Polish Aero Club, Wlodzimierz Skalik, raised a very interesting question.

'The Dutch Airbus A330 entered Polish airspace an hour before the drones did. How could the plane have been deployed ahead of the attack?'

Indeed, how did it happen that NATO planes arrived even before the alarm was raised? Could the entire drone incident in Poland have been a staged provocation from beginning to end?”

The post included a video of Polish lawmaker Wlodzimierz Skalik. Citing a Sky News report, he claimed that the NATO plane sent to assist Poland took off before the drones entered the country’s airspace.

The British outlet did report that the plane left the Netherlands 15 minutes before midnight. The first Russian drone crossed the border between Ukraine and Poland almost two hours later, at 12:50 a.m. Kyiv time. The authors of the piece likely took the timing of the first drone’s appearance in Poland from a post by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

WTF journalists verified the information using the flight-tracking service Flightradar24. The Dutch plane did take off from the airport at 11:45 p.m. Polish time. But Sky News got the timing of the first drone wrong: 12:50 a.m. in Kyiv is an hour behind Warsaw, not an hour ahead, as the report stated. That means the plane took off not an hour before the drone appeared, but five minutes — still before the drones arrived, not after.

WTF reporters found an explanation for this discrepancy as well. In his post, Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave only an approximate time when the drones crossed into Poland: “around 12:50 a.m.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, however, said that according to the General Staff, the drones appeared even earlier — around 11:30 p.m. That is about 15 minutes before the plane took off from Eindhoven in the Netherlands. With more than 600 kilometers to cover, it could not have entered Polish airspace ahead of the drones.