Unknown drones recently flew in close proximity to Danish and Norwegian airports, prompting speculation among some that they were Russia's delayed hybrid retaliation against NATO for backing Ukraine's drone flights in proximity to Russia's own airports over the past few years.

No evidence has emerged in support of that hypothesis, but Zelensky still dishonestly passed off such claims as fact during his speech at the latest Warsaw Security Forum.

According to him, "there is growing evidence that Russia may have used tankers in the Baltic Sea to launch drones – the drones that caused major disruption in Northern Europe. If tankers used by Russia are serving as drone platforms, then such tankers should not be free to operate in the Baltic. This is de facto Russia's military activity against European countries, so Europe has the right to close straits and sea routes to protect itself."

His proposal for NATO to close the Danish Staits to Russian shipping on this pretext, which would amount to an illegal blockade that could thus legitimize offensive action by Russia in self-defense, was predictable given Ukraine's and some of its patrons' interest in escalating the bloc's tensions with Russia. In fact, it might even be the case that this was the false flag that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service twice warned could soon be staged by the UK and Ukraine, albeit ultimately taking a different form.

They assessed that those two might orchestrate potentially forthcoming provocations in the Baltic that would then be blamed on Russia in order to justify cracking down on its sanctioned energy trade that the West dramatically describes as being conducted by a "shadow fleet" transiting through that sea. While no US ship was targeted with Ukrainian-transferred Soviet/Russian torpedoes nor were such mines fished out of the Baltic, Scandinavia's Russian drone scare still arguably fulfills the same role.

Skeptics might insist that Russia resorted to "plausibly deniable hybrid retaliation" against NATO, yet it's illogical that Russia would risk anything that could justify the same escalation that Putin's restraint has thus far avoided, the same goes for the earlier drone incident in Poland. Ditto that for the associated accusation that it violated Estonia's maritime airspace. All these incidents were spun by the West as deliberate Russian provocations and preceded escalatory proposals misportrayed as "retaliation".