Expert Available on NATO Planes Shooting Down Russian Drones Deep Inside Poland

Michael John Williams, associate professor at Syracuse University and expert on NATO, US foreign policy and international security, is available to speak to media on issues related NATO-member warplanes shotting down several Russian drones over Poland, the first time the alliance has engaged Russian drones over a member’s territory. To schedule an interview, please contact Ellen James Mbuqe, executive director of media relations, at ejmbuqe@syr.edu.

• “Russia has made regular incursions into NATO air space for years now. What is different in this case is that NATO military forces shot down the intruding aircraft. This was an intentional intrusion most likely to test allied response capability and to signal Russian capability.
• This incursion highlights NATO’s lack of air defense systems, which has been hotly discussed for years now.
• In 2024, at NATO’s Washington Summit, the alliance agreed a Russia strategy, which was largely written up by the end of the year but then set aside in January 2025 to avoid upsetting the Trump Administration. But ironically this incident highlights well President Trump’s critique that NATO allies are too dependent on the United States,” said Williams.

Williams has been a NATO Security Studies Fulbright Fellow at the Brussels School of Governance in Belgium; a Robert Bosch Fellow in the German Ministry of Defense, a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, and a DAAD Fellow at the Bundeswehr Center for Social Science in Potsdam. During his time at the German Ministry of Defense he was special advisor to the Parliamentary State Secretary for Defense.