Intel officials are split on whether Russia deliberately flew drones into Poland but agree Putin is getting more aggressive

By Katie Bo Lillis, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Natasha Bertrand, CNN

(CNN) — In the week since NATO fighter jets scrambled to shoot down multiple Russian drones that had crossed into alliance airspace in Poland, US and Western intelligence officials have been unable to determine whether the incursion was accidental or an intentional effort by Russia to probe Western air defenses and gauge NATO’s response.

Officials cautioned that either way, the episode still represents a worrying signal that the Kremlin’s willingness to pique NATO — perhaps at the risk of escalating the conflict — has grown.

“It doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” a senior Western intelligence official said. “There’s certainly something that has changed in the way that the Kremlin is thinking about their risk tolerance on targeting.”

But intelligence gathered about the drones themselves — their flight pattern and their technical specifications — has been mixed and difficult to interpret.

Ukraine and Poland have both said publicly that they are convinced the incursion was deliberate — an assessment shared by multiple European nations. But in conversations with a dozen senior US and Western military, intelligence, diplomatic and congressional officials, it was clear that there is no consensus view across the NATO alliance.

One senior US military official in the region put the odds that Russia intentionally entered NATO airspace at “50-50.”

Absent clear intelligence out of Russia — one of the intelligence community’s hardest targets — it’s a nearly impossible case to adjudicate with high confidence, outside analysts said. That puts NATO in the uncomfortable position of determining how to respond to an unprecedented incident without a clear sense of what Russia intended.

“We just don’t have sufficient intel one way or another,” said another US source familiar with the intelligence.

Although the senior Western intelligence official said that the drones flight pattern suggested that the drones were lost and attempting to reacquire a GPS signal — suggesting they had simply been knocked off course by Ukrainian jamming — other indicators could be interpreted either way.

The fact that many of the Russian drones were unarmed dummies could mean that Russia wanted to probe Polish air defenses without running the risk of any casualties. But many of the drones Russia sends into Ukraine in any attack are dummies, designed to spoof and exhaust Ukrainian air defenses, experts say. This, too, could be coincidental.

And the sheer number of drones that veered into Poland is hardly dispositive, senior officials and outside analysts said, because the drones are often programmed in bulk and in attacks of this size, it’s logical that 19 or 20 might encounter Ukrainian electronic war defenses and respond identically. In the last several weeks alone, there have been at least four salvos from Russia into Ukraine that involved more than 400 projectiles in the air at once, the senior Western intelligence official noted.

Privately, some officials have formed an opinion. The senior Western intelligence official told CNN that they were “leaning” towards an assessment that the incident was unintentional, even as they condemned it as a worrying sign that the Kremlin has become more reckless. The US source familiar with the intelligence agreed.

Yet, another US military official and one congressional official familiar with the intelligence said it appeared intentional.

Ukrainian officials contacted by CNN acknowledged that Kyiv deploys electronic warfare and jamming during Russian aerial attacks, which can cause enemy drones to go off their programmed course. Another Russian drone veered into Romania earlier this week. But a senior official added that he had “never witnessed such huge deviations” in more than three years of war.

“This is the balance. Are we dismissing this or are we thinking this is a significant escalation in the sense that Russia is now directly probing its potential adversaries air defenses?” said Samuel Bendett, an expert in Russian military technology.

Ukrainians concerned military support may be diverted to NATO members

Though Ukrainian officials had initially hoped the Russian drone incident would spark a strong response from Western allies, Kyiv has emphasized that surging more air defense systems and munitions to the country should be the priority. Ukraine has appealed for more US made Patriot systems, and some officials now fear that materiel might now be redirected to NATO allies on its border.

If the incursion was intentional, said the congressional official familiar with the intelligence, it was likely designed to do a number of things: probe Western defenses to gauge the reaction time, learn more about how NATO responds, map the routes used by the West to ship weapons into Ukraine and identify future targets — and of course, antagonize the West. Russia might hope that raising the specter of civilian casualties in a NATO country could create fissures in public support for the war in Ukraine, noted the senior Western intelligence official.

But even if it was unintentional, the senior Western intelligence official said, the episode suggested that Russia is more willing to risk an accidental strike on NATO, either through sloppy targeting or inadequate electronic warfare defenses or something else. That heightens the risk of a dangerous miscalculation that could end in direct conflict.

“Whether it was intentional or not, it is absolutely reckless, it is absolutely dangerous,” NATO Secretary Mark Rutte said over the weekend, while cautioning that the assessment remained ongoing.

But part of what makes Russia’s intentions so difficult to parse is the fact that Moscow often engages in provocative actions behind a shady gauze of plausible deniability. The episode might have, in fact, been designed to appear inadvertent, multiple officials and outside experts said.

The Russian military has said only that there were “no plans to target facilities on the territory of Poland.” And according to Bendett, one Russian UAV expert has noted that Russia’s armed drones have military grade antennas and sensors that were able to overcome Ukrainian electronic warfare tactics, while the dummy drones that flew into Poland, with cheaper GPS and other sensors, were not.

Poland has said that Belarus, whose territory the drones were launched from, also sent warning that off-course drones were headed for its airspace.

Both of those things are why the senior Western intelligence official says they believe the episode was an accident.

“Usually if the Russians intended something like this, they don’t talk about it,” this person said.

But of course, those two data points could also have been part of an elaborate smokescreen. Russia may have been looking for “a way to see what’s up in a way that would be easy to walk back, dismiss, and have everybody say, ‘This was not an intentional strike,’” Bendett said — an incursion that was “intentional to make it look unintentional.”

“These are the logical and intellectual questions we’re all wrestling with,” he said. “A lot in NATO and Eastern Europe are saying this was likely intentional precisely because we would all be saying, ‘Well, an attack of 800 drones and 20 were off course? Yeah, that’s a margin of error that’s acceptable in such a large attack.’”

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