Until recently, when Russian drones strayed into Nato airspace during mass attacks on Ukraine, fighter jets would scramble, not to shoot them down, but to watch. The allies tracked the drones as they flew across the Nato border, either jammed off course or deliberately redirected to confuse Ukrainian air defences. In both cases, if the drones didn’t crash into a field somewhere in Romania or Poland, they always made it back to bomb Ukrainians, under the close watch of Nato’s best pilots on fully loaded warplanes.

Is Nato so terrified of Vladimir Putin that it allows Russian drones to roam its skies freely?

For Ukrainians, this was infuriating. They could almost understand why the West refused to shoot down Russian drones over Ukraine out of fear of escalation and a direct confrontation w

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