Russia’s provocations are menacing Nato. The cold war shows how it needs to respond | Sergey Radchenko

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Earlier this month, a swarm of Russian drones violated Poland’s borders. Some were shot down. A few days later, another Russian drone overflew Romania en route to Ukraine. The Romanian air defence let it get away. Then, on 19 September, three Russian MiG-31 fighters intruded into Estonia’s airspace. Italian F-35s – in the area on a Nato mission – intercepted the Russians and saw them off.

Although this is hardly the first time Russia has violated Nato’s airspace, the extent and the brazen nature of these latest provocations make them stand out. Incursions will end only when the intruders are shot down. Fortunately, shooting down an occasional Russian fighter jet, never mind drones, is very unlikely to lead to a broader escalation. It may even help cool down tensions by reinforcing the red lines.

The cold war offers important lessons about handling such incidents. Although there is a perception in the public memory that the cold war outsourced fighting to what we now call the global south, with the two superpowers avoiding direct military clashes, this is in fact not the case. There were several incidents in the early 1950s that involved US aircraft being attacked by Soviet interceptors. Two of these incidents– in April 1950 and in June 1952 – occurred over the Baltic Sea. Around the same time, Soviet and American fighter pilots were engaged in the skies over Korea, with scores killed on both sides. And then, after the US developed the U-2 spy plane, the Soviets and their allies tried repeatedly to shoot down the intruders.

The most famous of these episodes happened on 1 May 1960, when a U-2 piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk (today’s Ekaterinburg), deep inside the Soviet territory. The shootdown was a propaganda victory for the USSR, which went on to proudly exhibit the plane wreckage and the unlucky pilot (who safely catapulted from the plane). But there the matter ended. Not only was there no US retaliation for the shootdown, but Dwight D Eisenhower, the then US president, temporarily paused sending any more U-2s into the Soviet airspace since it was deemed too dangerous.

The Soviets downed another U-2 over Cuba on 27 October 1962, a day remembered by cold war historians as “Black Saturday” for all the unfortunate events that could have led to nuclear war (though none of them did). While this particular incident can in retrospect be described as a reckless act, it was only reckless because it happened at the very height of the Cuban missile crisis, when the world seemed to stare right in the face of Armageddon. We are not in this situation.

Other powers also on occasion brought down US or allied planes. Between 1962 and 1967, China shot down no less than five Republic of China (Taiwanese) U-2 planes. A very serious incident occurred on 15 April 1969, when the North Koreans attacked a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane, with the loss of 31 American lives – the deadliest such incident during the cold war for the US air force. On that sad occasion, the plane was well clear of North Korea’s airspace. But the US government kept its cool.

Nor did the US resort to a military response on 1 September 1983, when the Soviets shot down a civilian airliner that accidentally overflew Soviet territory in the far east. That unfortunate incident caused the death of 269 passengers and crew, including one sitting US congressman.

One could perhaps make the argument that there was no retaliation to all these incidents precisely because the Americans were inherently more cautious than the Soviets. They did not want to escalate tensions for fear of a nuclear war. In fact, both sides were cautious and understood that lethal incidents could happen but that, after a little posturing, it was just safer to tone things down. In the end, the ability and readiness of both sides to use lethal force against intruders served to deter the other and keep the cold war confrontation from spinning out of control.

Nato must take these lessons to heart. Shooting down intruding Russian aircraft is not a step towards war. It is a prophylactic measure necessary for maintaining credibility in the face of the adversary’s provocations. Both sides engage in psychological operations intended to test the other’s resolve. If one side crosses implicit red lines in doing so, it must be taught a lesson. If it is not taught a timely lesson, it will have concluded that the red lines are fictional and can be crossed with impunity. That will only lead to new dangerous situations as the adversary pushes further and further.

Protocols exist for handling the intrusion of enemy aircraft. They help sort out situations when the enemy accidentally – or otherwise – crosses into one’s airspace. Many of these protocols were in fact developed during the cold war as Moscow and Washington grappled with the risks of inadvertent escalation.

And here’s another lesson from the cold war. Even at its height, the two sides found ways to talk to each. For example, a hotline was set up between Moscow and Washington after the Cuban missile crisis to help with direct communication between the Soviet and US leaders. There were also a number of backchannels for difficult negotiations.

As the US begins its strategic retreat from Europe, it is up to the Europeans to learn to talk to the Russians, including through military-to-military contacts. For every hour of fiery public proclamations (at which the Europeans are truly expert), there must be three hours of quiet behind-the-doors diplomacy.

But when diplomacy fails, force must be used. When the intruders fail to respond, the only sensible response is to shoot them down. And we should be under no illusions that this is exactly what the Russians would do if our side sent fighter jets into their airspace. Why, that’s exactly what they did in the past.

Such shootdowns may briefly lead to a flare-up of tensions. This happened, for instance, on 24 November 2015, when the Turkish military shot down a Russian strike bomber that intruded into its airspace. The Russians responded militantly at first and imposed sanctions on Turkey. But later, Vladimir Putin chose to forget all about it and embrace Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president. It helped that the latter expressed regret. Both sides recognised that bringing tensions down served their respective interests. The Russians have subsequently abstained from military provocations against Turkey, which is unarguably a pointer to the Kremlin’s reluctant ability to internalise lessons.

Putin will continue testing the boundaries of the permissible. He aims to humiliate Nato and further divide the west by exposing frictions between countries on the eastern flank that are directly threatened by his provocations and their more fortunate allies like the Italians, the French and the British, that, for now, can afford to take a more relaxed attitude. Yet they have stationed fighter aircraft in the area, and it is these aircraft that will be relied upon to teach Putin a lesson.

• Sergey Radchenko is Wilson E Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A Kissinger Center, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies