NATO scrambled fighter jets to intercept Russian planes far more often over its eastern flank this July than a year earlier, the alliance's Allied Joint Force Command in Brunssum announced on 5 August. Each scramble is a launch to intercept an unidentified aircraft. The command linked the surge to Russian military planes repeatedly probing the edges of allied airspace.

Russian pressure on NATO's eastern edge has built for years, but this summer the alliance changed how it answers: it gave pilots authority that includes destroying "objects that pose a threat," ending a peacetime escort format that had held since 2004. More probing now meets a harder line.

Compared with July 2025, these scrambles rose by more than 250%, the command said.

"Russian military aircraft repeatedly flew close to NATO airspace without a flight plan and transponder signal, leaving our fighters to launch, intercept, and identify them," it added.

Polish jets keep meeting Russian spy planes over the Baltic

The report landed amid a run of intercepts near the Baltic Sea. Poland's Defense Ministry, under Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, reported its fighters intercepted a Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane on 4 August, 56 kilometers northwest of Koszalin in West Pomeranian Voivodeship.

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A day earlier, the minister reported, Polish crews had caught another Russian reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic near Łeba, its transponder off. Allied pilots have run similar missions for months: French and Swedish jets met six Russian aircraft over the Baltic in a single day in June, and crews scrambled through last fall to track flights between mainland Russia and the Kaliningrad exclave.

What are the surge forces on the alliance

Every unannounced flight burns allied flight hours and holds interceptors on standby. NATO members have already fired on Russian drones crossing their skies this summer, and the more often crewed planes go dark near the border, the higher the odds a close encounter escalates. The odds of a close encounter that escalates.

US negotiators have quietly kept a deal to let Ukraine help build Patriot interceptor missiles alive, even after US President Donald Trump publicly cast doubt on it, Reuters reported. Four people familiar with the talks said Washington never ordered them stopped. Ukraine, running low on air defenses, urgently wants the missiles to blunt Russia's growing ballistic strikes.

Russian daily drone attacks forced Kyiv to chase air defense from every direction at once, including home-grown interceptors. But this year, Moscow has increasingly turned to ballistic missiles, the hardest weapons for Ukraine to stop. US-supplied PAC-3 interceptors fired by Patriot systems are among the few weapons that can reliably shoot them down, and Ukraine has now run out.

The talks Trump seemed to kill

Last week, Trump appeared to reverse course, telling reporters the US had not agreed to let Ukraine build Patriots and must be "very careful about letting somebody build them." 

According to Reuters, two sources tied that to a tense White House meeting with Zelenskyy. Yet the negotiations pressed on. 

"No order was given to halt the discussions," one source said, adding that talks continued with US arms makers and military officials.

Matthew Whitaker, Washington's envoy to NATO, is leading the drive for a deal. He visited Kyiv last month to weigh options with Ukrainian officials and weapons executives. His spokesperson framed the trip around drone collaboration that would benefit US forces, without naming the Patriot plan. 

A senior administration official told Reuters that any agreement must protect US technology. 

Reuters: The Patriot deal Trump denied is quietly still alive

What Ukraine could build

The options include making Patriot components in Ukraine and shipping them to Germany for final assembly, the sources said. A US official called that the most feasible route. Germany already produces an older Patriot model, and the advanced PAC-3, the newest Patriot interceptor, is expected to follow.

Ukraine could instead join an existing US-European Patriot program, or build a cheaper version of the PAC-3. 

It might also tap Lockheed Martin's new lower-cost interceptor, the PAC-3 ACE, unveiled last month.

A promise made, then pulled back

During a meeting with Zelenskyy in Ankara last month, Trump said the US would license Ukraine to make PAC-3s. His later reversal caught many off guard, including Zelenskyy. In a follow-up call, US Vice President JD Vance assured him that deals between presidents would hold, one source said.

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Ukraine's clock is running

Even with a deal, Ukraine would not receive newly built interceptors for a year or more. So Kyiv is urging allies to hand over some of theirs and exploring swaps to get missiles sooner. 

Earlier, Zelenskyy warned that Ukraine had run out of Patriots. That day, it intercepted just one of 27 ballistic missiles Russia fired. 

Global stocks of high-end interceptors have shrunk since the Iran war, with Patriots once bound for Ukraine diverted to US forces and Gulf allies.

Ukraine's ambassador to the UK and former army chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has explained his widely reported remark that Ukraine will never join NATO, saying he strongly backs the Alliance but believes it must rebuild its outdated doctrine before it could even admit Kyiv, according to Interfax-Ukraine. The war, he argued, has pushed Ukraine technologically ahead of the bloc.

Ukraine's push for lasting security now runs on several tracks at once — NATO membership, European guarantees, and its own rising weight as a security provider whose battlefield lessons allies increasingly want.

The remark that went in circles

Days earlier, at an ambassadors' meeting in Kyiv, Zaluzhnyi said Ukraine would never join NATO as things stand, arguing it cannot join an organization that still holds Second World War-era doctrines — a line that drew wide attention. 

He recalled 12 years chasing NATO standards while hearing yearly "fairy tales" about imminent membership. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry later said the words had been taken out of context.

"I am for NATO"

Asked to explain himself at a diplomatic club in Kyiv, Zaluzhnyi said he is firmly a supporter of the Alliance. He noted he led the 2019 shift of Ukraine's forces to NATO standards, rewriting almost 37 laws. 

"I made so many enemies you cannot even imagine. I am for NATO," he said.

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Why he says NATO must change

Politically, though, "NATO raises many questions, as a bloc that guarded the old world," he said. In 2026, Ukraine used nearly every weapon NATO fields — save Tomahawks, nuclear arms, aircraft carriers, and F-35 jets — and applied their doctrines in combat. 

"The resource is exhausted. Russia found a counter to all of it," he said. NATO, he added, "is in the doctrine of the end of the Second World War, while we are technologically ahead."

Only once the Alliance adopts a completely new doctrine, Zaluzhnyi said, will it be ready to admit Ukraine. He again called for "an absolutely new" security bloc, likely anchored in Europe, citing the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force as a model.