One of Vladimir Putin’s nemeses has issued a dire warning to the Russian president if he ever considers launching an all-out attack on NATO.
“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly,” Radoslaw Sikorski, who serves as both deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Poland, a member of the alliance, told a security conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Saturday.
“We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power,” he went on, adding that “if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half.”
Maria Zakharova, a firebrand spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, shot back that Sikorski has “Russophobia of the brain.”
Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine has repeatedly spilled over into neighboring Poland, including when a stray Ukrainian air-defense missile killed two Polish citizens in 2022 and when 19 Russian drones entered Polish airspace on a single night in September 2025.
Russia has also repeatedly fired on Ukrainian targets near the border. The latest salvo came on Sunday, when Moscow launched strikes against a train station in Yahodyn, less than a mile from Polish territory. Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and David Petraeus, former CIA chief, had passed through just hours earlier.
These are not isolated incidents. Three Russian fighter jets also flew into the airspace above Estonia, another NATO member, last September, where they remained for at least 10 minutes, penetrating up to six miles into alliance territory.
Similar breaches have taken place in Finland, Lithuania, Norway, and Romania. Earlier this summer, German authorities discovered an explosive-laden drone near a Ukrainian cargo plane at an airport in Leipzig.
Moscow is also accused of carrying out hybrid operations, including sabotage, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns, against NATO members. In the spring, alliance forces in Norway caught Russian submarine units training to use a new weapon to compromise vital underwater cables connecting the Svalbard archipelago to the mainland, as Reuters reported last week.
Putin’s growing willingness to test NATO’s resolve comes as President Donald Trump has strained U.S. relations with the rest of the alliance.
Trump has lambasted allies for what he sees as falling short of their military spending targets, denouncing NATO as a “paper tiger” after members refused to join in his campaign against the Iranian regime earlier this year.
