Already and this is the daily This is the Dailias.
Oh now it makes sense. Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Wednesday, the seventeenth of September. I'm Sam Kazlowski.
I'm Emma Gillespie.
In the past two weeks, both Poland and Romania have reported Russian drones flying in their airspace. Importantly, NATO forces shot down Russian aircraft for the first time in the alliance's seventy five year history. Now both countries and neighbors of Ukraine, which continues to face Russian air strikes and ground offensives as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues. But there's a key difference between an attack on Ukraine and an attack on Poland or Romania, and that's NATO.
On today's podcast, we're going to look at what makes Russian activity in Poland and Romania so different, the idea of collective defense and some of the broader implications here.
Sam, this is a really interesting topic that we're chatting through today and I'm really keen to learn more. But before we get into the kind of specifics of what's happened in the past week over countries like Romania and Poland. I think we need to break down a bit more about NATO to understand what it is and how it actually functions.
So here's where my mind went with this question that I knew was going to come. Because this is an important part is we could do it as a straight politics explain now, but we could also do it like we're at school, because we always say that these world leaders are kind of like kids fighting in the playground. So let's go through it in a school metaphor. Okay, okay. So, NATO, which is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is a military
alliance of thirty two European and North American countries. It was founded just after World War Two and originally designed to counter the Soviet threat during the Cold War. Now, in the playground, if you and your thirty one other friends make a promise to always stick up for each other against bullies, no matter who that bully was, they basically went a bit further and promised that if someone picks on one of them, all the others will help
protect them. Okay, Now, one important thing to remember here is that Ukraine is not a member of NATO. It's not in that list of thirty.
Two, Ukraine goes to a different school.
It goes to a different school. It's been actually requesting to join for a long time now. Instead, NATO classifies Ukraine as a NATO partner country, which basically means they're friends with the group in the playground. But if there's only one seat left at the back of the bus, a NATO member country is going to get it over Ukraine, but they'll kind of go into bat for each other. As a general principle, Okay, got it.
So the core kind of principle of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is that an attack on one ally is an attack on all a thirty two person or party, friendship or alliance. That's a lot of people. They've got to be some rules around making this work, right.
Yeah, And that's the Treaty of NATO, And we refer to the parts of that treaty as articles. And the two articles to really pay attention to today are articles four and five. So Article four is like when one friend thinks they're getting bullied or something worrying happens to them and they tell their friends, Hey, I think we need to talk about this. So it's when one country says to all the others, I'm worried about my safety. Can we just sit down and have a discussion about
what to do? Yep? Article five is the actual promise to help. That's like saying, in the playground, someone has hit me, so we're all going to come and help you out now, Okay.
So Article four is more about maybe the perceived threat or increased aggressions, whereas Article five is about this has literally happened. There has been a breach of one ally, and therefore now we are all in it.
Yeah. And the really confusing part though, is what it means and what help means. So Article five says that each country will help by quote taking such action as it deems necessary. That basically means each country decides for itself what kind of support it provides. So it doesn't mean that all thirty two countries go to war. Some might send troops, others might offer money or diplomatic backing.
It really depends on each country's own decision making. And so I guess in the playground it would be you could go and tell the teacher, or you could get directly involved in the fight.
Okay. So Article five, then it seems kind of almost deliberately vague in its wording to give each country their own scope to determine their response. Has it actually ever been used? Has Article five ever been triggered by a breach of a NATO member?
So only once, and that's remarkable, since nineteen forty nine, and that one time was straight after nine to eleven. So the US, who is a member of NATO, they didn't actually even ask for it. NATO's Secretary General suggested it as a show of solidarity after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the response involved NATO's surveillance planes patrolling US territory and NATO ships standing by for deployment in the Mediterranean, there's the closest
body of water to Afghanistan. But NATO didn't actually participate in the Afghanistan invasion itself, and that's because the US preferred to work with individual countries like Australia rather than dealing with this whole alliance and this whole body.
Okay, fascinating, So it sounds more like in that instance that the NATO alliance was kind of posturing its power, this sort of aloof presence of you know, we have these ships we have these planes we're contributing to surveillance, but from.
A distance exactly, and there hasn't been besides that, another example for us to point to to see a variation in that response.
Okay, but then in terms of Article four, which speaks to the perception of a threat or an escalating threat, that has been invoked much more recently, right, Yeah.
Well a couple of days ago, and it was invoked by Poland after Poland alleged Russian drones violated its airspace. It's significant to invoke Article four, but it's definitely not a dramatic escalation. Any NATO member can invoke Article four
if they think their security is threatened. And interestingly, when I was looking into what that actually looks like, NATO countries meet regularly anyway, so this was kind of an agenda item to their regular meeting of we need to talk about this, and I think it went right up the top of the agenda, right. But it's been used eight times before, so Turkia has used it several times over Syria, and eight NATO countries used it together when
Russia invaded Ukraine back in twenty twenty two. Now, Article four doesn't mean that any country actually has to do anything. It's just formal talks about a growing threat.
Okay, so a little more frequently used that article five, but still only eight times since nineteen thirty nine. It's significant. But let's now get into sam what has actually happened over the past week. Now we have all this knowledge, we understand the playground politics. Nice walk me through it.
So we go to September nine, last week. That was when Russia launched a massive drone attack on Ukraine, and nineteen Russian drones ended up flying into Polish airspace. Poland and Ukraine share of border. Poland immediately shut down four major airports in the country and scrambled their fighter jets. And this became NATO's real first test of working together
to shoot down enemy aircraft. So Polish F sixteens fighter jets, they teamed up with Dutch F thirty fives and they were backed up by Italian and German forces.
That's quite a big response.
Yeah, it was short and sharp because by the morning of September ten, NATO forces had shot down four of the drones. There were no other drones in the airspace. The rest of them either crashed or were found scattered across Polish territory.
I remember when that new story broke last week and was kind of splashed all over the TVs and new sites, and it felt a little bit scary straightaway, like, oh, my god, is Russia attacking Poland? But then Russia came out and kind of said, oh, these were drones that strayed into Polish territory.
Yeah, Well, the Foreign Minister said these were groundless accusations, they had no interest in any escalation, and the Defense Ministry even made the point that its drones couldn't actually reach Poland because it was too far. That was all pretty easily debunked. Investigators found that the crash drones had been fitted with extra fuel tanks specifically for the further distance, and the wreckage had identifying features that directly tied the drones to Russia's military.
All right, So analysts then suggesting that rather than this kind of accidental straying into Polish territory, it might have been a lot more of a posturing by Russia. Is that when Poland then decided to invoke Article four.
Yeah, it was only a couple of hours after the drones were in the air. So the Polish PM said this brought Poland quote the closest we have been to open conflicts since World War II. NATO's boss said this wasn't an isolated incident, and the EU called it the most serious European airspace violation by Russia since its war with Ukraine began. And so late last week NATO held
talks under Article four at its headquarters in Belgium. And I think another way to frame that posturing idea that you're talking about is it sounds like what a lot of the response is centered around. Is this idea of Russia testing the waters? What can they do that invokes an Article four response but not an Article five response.
Because it is worth mentioning here that Putin has been a vocal critic, a long standing critic of NATO. He repeatedly talks about, you know, NATO threatening Russia's own self determination, and he has threatened Ukraine with you know, Ceasepine negotiations that they cannot include NATO membership.
He really doesn't want NATO or a NATO member on his doorstep. And so if you think about the Russian border as that doorstep, he wants NATO to be as far away from that as.
Possible right, And so that's Poland. We had that happen, and this pretty you know, widespread condemnation from across the EU and NATO's strong language against Russia's actions. But a few days later, something very similar took place in Romania, which is a NATO member too.
Right, Yes, over the weekend, a Russian drone flew ten kilometers into Romanian territory, hung around in the airspace for about fifty minutes, and this time it was Romanian and German fighter jets that tracked it but didn't shoot it down, And that's because they were worried about the collateral damage that falling drones may cause on civilian community below in Romania. Now Romania is a NATO country, So that's the airspace of two NATO countries violated in seven days.
Okay, so a lot that's been going on. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine was several years ago, now, twenty twenty two. This conflict has been ongoing. Has this kind of thing happened frequently over the course of that conflict? Are we talking about a kind of new development entirely in the course.
Of this war. I think a lot of people are trying to figure out in this conversation and whether this is something they should sit up and take notice too, because it's really different, and it's a bit of a yes no answer, because since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO says there's been over one hundred and fifty incidents of what they call hybrid operations in NATO territory and that has escalated in their frequency as the years have passed.
Okay, so I am not a military or geopolitical expert. What is a hybrid operations?
Neither am I, but some really helpful resources on the Internet were so hybrid operations are basically the hostile stuff that falls short of actual war. So Russia can cause damage still by these acts. It can still test NATO's responses without knowing they're about to trigger Article five. So we're talking here about cyber attacks on power grids, disinformation being spread online, cutting Internet cables under the sea, and they definitely all cause real problems, but they are tricky
to respond to with traditional military force. It's not the kind of thing that an army can respond too quickly. And so, as I said before, this idea that Russia's trying to find where NATO's line is in terms of evoking a response. It is the first time though that drones in another country's airspace, let alone two other countries, has happened in such a short period of time.
Right, So two breaches of NATO members airspace in one week. NATO since you know, basically doubling down on its condemnation against Russia for these aggressions. Let's say there is an escalation here that Russia invades more airspace of more NATO members, or it you know, goes back to Poland and Romania and threatens them more extensively.
Or a drone actually lands in you know, exactly the territory of another country.
Advice into a territory. What happens for NATO as a body to take the conversation from Article four to Article.
Five, So they would sit down quite quickly and invoke Article five. It would be the second occasion, as we've said, since nineteen forty nine. And they need consensus, really, they need all thirty two members to agree that a military response is about to happen and what the nature of that response would look like. And that's not something that we should presume is going to be easy to achieve. You have to remember that when the organization was established
back in the forty there were twelve. Now it's thirty two. There are about four or five countries in Europe, including Ukraine, who want entry into NATO, So it could get even bigger, and I guess it theoretically means that any member could actually block action, and that could get complicated. One point to remember is the US and the US in all of.
I was going to say, just because this is a military pact, it's not a political pact per se, it doesn't mean that all governments are aligned on the same agenda. And you can't ignore the US in that conversation.
No, so the US are not for Ukraine being in NATO. And the reason for that across many presidents, not just President Trump, both Democrats and Republican is that they want to avoid the situation where American troops and Russian troops are facing off, because that scene is kind of the worst case scenario, and so the fear there would be that if Ukraine was in NATO and then Ukraine got hit, the US would be obliged to go in and back them up. That would lead to a direct confrontation.
Yeah, but NATO has gotten bigger. We had Sweden join. Recently its membership has expanded. Finland as well joined, which increased the kind of NATO land border around Russia. But Ukraine obviously has the very real and live threat of an ongoing conflict. As we speak, sam, where does this leave us? Where do we go from here? What happens next?
Well, I think we have some answers, but then we have some new questions. So the answer that we have is that NATO are ready to work together, and we saw that with some of the kind of combined fighter jet operations that were scattering the drones and responding in lifetime, Germany's being particularly present in those operations, same with the Netherlands, and Russia learned then that just flying a drone over
those sorts of countries will lead to a response. So they kind of tested the line and perhaps put their toe a little bit over it in terms of a non response. But the big question that is still there is how many violations, even if they're smaller ones, we'd actually count as an armed attack that requires Article five.
When do you cross that line from hybrid operations to accidental or posturing moments to an offensive.
If it's two in a week, it's article four. You know where is that line? Is it ten? Is it twenty? Is it three? We don't really know. It's not our job you and I to figure that one out. We'll leave it to the pros. But it's definitely a heightened temperature in that part of the world, more so than it was seven days ago. Yeah.
Fascinating stuff and as always, we will continue to keep a close eye on this one and cover it over on the Daily OL's feed as well as here on the podcast. Thank you Sam for taking us through that.
Thanks Sam, and thank you for listening.
To today's episode, or thanks for watching if you're over on our YouTube. We'll be back a little bit later with your evening news headlines, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Madden. I'm a proud Arunda Banjelung Kalkadin woman from Gadighl country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and torrest Rate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.