Putin says there will be “response” to potential attack on Russia. Poland’s Sikorski warns Russia may stage that attack itself

Russia may be preparing to fake an attack on its own territory, Poland’s top diplomat warns. Recent Kremlin statements look like the information groundwork for a staged provocation Moscow could use to justify new aggression against European countries, Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on X.

“I’m expecting an attack on Russian territory under a false flag, to which Putin will ‘respond,'” Sikorski wrote, casting the expected provocation as a manufactured trigger rather than a real one.

His point is that the Kremlin may be building the pretext in public before acting on it.

Putin threatens Europe over drones

Sikorski was reacting to Russian ruler Putin’s threats to strike European states if drone launches against Russian targets are traced to their soil.

“They understand there will be a retaliatory strike. I think everyone understands this, or should,” Putin said at an informal meeting with military academy graduates, claiming countries try to distance themselves from such launches.

He also alleged the Baltic states hide drones in their airspace and pass them off as Ukrainian to avoid escalation with Moscow, per Militarnyi. 

Sikorski recalls Gleiwitz playbook

Sikorski reached back to 1939. On 31 August that year, Nazi Germany staged a fake assault on a German radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz, now Gliwice, dressing operatives in Polish uniforms to fabricate a pretext for invading Poland the next day.

The implication is that Moscow could try the same move, an attack built to look like someone else’s, to license a wider war against Europe.

Russia has accused the Baltics of harboring Ukrainian drones, threatened Latvia with retaliation, and now floated strikes on Europe over drone launches, each step laying public groundwork. 

In 2025, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service Head Sergey Naryshkin accused NATO of escalating military activity near Russia’s borders. He warned that Poland and the Baltic states would be the first to suffer in the event of a war between Moscow and the Alliance.