A Russian drone has once again ended up almost on NATO's doorstep. The spokesman for the Polish Armed Forces Operational Command, Jacek Goryszewski, confirmed to TVN24 that a Russian drone came down in the immediate vicinity of the Dorohusk border crossing, "again near Yahodyn". Ukraine's border service said the impact was recorded just a few hundred metres from the state border. "According to preliminary information, the Yahodyn crossing itself was not damaged," said spokesman Andriy Demchenko.

What exactly was targeted has not been officially announced. Russian military channels, based on footage, claim the target may have been cross-border logistics infrastructure - a truck park, a customs terminal or a petrol station. The Polish military says it does not yet have data that would allow it to establish with certainty what the drone was trying to hit. Yahodyn-Dorohusk is one of the most important road and rail corridors between Ukraine and Poland, carrying heavy freight traffic.

Poland scrambles its jets

Poland's reaction was immediate. The Operational Command said it had activated available forces because of Russian attacks on western Ukraine: military aircraft were scrambled, and ground-based air defence and radar reconnaissance systems were put on heightened alert. The command called the measures preventive. During the attack, operations at Lublin and Rzeszów airports were temporarily suspended - and Rzeszów has been, since the start of the war, one of the main hubs through which Western military aid reaches Ukraine.

A new Geran that doesn't rely on satellites

Ukrainian monitoring channels claim that a new jet-powered Geran-5 K5 model, first spotted in combat use only in the last few days, was flying toward Yahodyn. Neither Ukrainian nor Polish state services have officially confirmed this so far. According to the same sources, the new version has a modified fuselage and a DSMAC optical path-correction system, which compares images of the terrain below the drone with a preloaded digital map. That kind of guidance depends less on satellite navigation and is harder to fool with conventional electronic jamming.

Russia has been using the basic Geran-5 since early 2026. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, it is a large jet-powered strike drone about six metres long, with a wingspan of up to 5.5 metres, a warhead of around 90 kilograms and a declared range of roughly 1,000 kilometres.

The corridor has been hit before

On September 13, Russian drones struck infrastructure right next to the crossing. One drone hit a petrol station about two kilometres from the Polish border, setting two trucks on fire, and the locomotive of the international Kyiv-Warsaw passenger train was also hit. Passengers and crew were not injured. Six crossings into Ukraine were then put on heightened alert.

The first strike landed two kilometres from Poland, this one a few hundred metres. The Balkans know well the difference between an "incident" and a cause for war, and how often that line is drawn by others rather than by the people who live along the border. How many more metres have to be shaved off before someone in Brussels says enough is enough?