On Sunday, August 7, 2025, at around 9:40 p.m., in the village of Polatycze in the Lublin Voivodeship, Border Guard officers discovered a scorched spot in a cornfield containing the remains of an unidentified unmanned aerial vehicle. The village, located in Biała County, lies about 3 kilometers in a straight line from the border crossing with the Republic of Belarus in Terespol, and the crash site is approximately 300 meters from the Bug River.
Russian Gerbera drone decoys / Illustrative photo: Telegram
“The duty officer of the Terespol police station received a report from Border Guard officers about the discovery of the remains of an unidentified flying object in the area of the Terespol border crossing. We have notified the relevant services and the District Prosecutor’s Office in Biała Podlaska about the incident. The site where the object was found is being secured. No one was injured in connection with the incident,” the Biała Podlaska Municipal Police Headquarters reported on social media.
According to media reports, unofficially it may be a Russian mock-up of a Gerber combat drone, widely used in airstrikes on targets in Ukraine together with drones from the Geran/Shahed family. They are unarmed and serve primarily to draw anti-aircraft fire in order to saturate Ukrainian defenses and increase the effectiveness of attacks.
Meanwhile, according to information from the Lublin Regional Prosecutor’s Office, the drone was unarmed, bore inscriptions in Cyrillic, and its direction of approach is unknown.
Zabezpieczamy miejsce ujawnienia obiektu. W związku ze zdarzeniem nikt nie doznał obrażeń.
— Policja Bialska (@PBialska) September 7, 2025
Earlier, on Saturday, September 6, near the village of Majdan-Sielec in the Lublin Voivodeship, a smuggling drone crashed — according to preliminary information from the Military Police. Cyrillic inscriptions were found on the wreckage, and the crash may have been caused by a lack of fuel. However, photos appeared in the media suggesting that it might also have been a Gerber-type drone. Especially since from late Saturday afternoon until night, a record Russian attack on targets in Ukraine was carried out using 818 combat assets, mostly drones from the Geran/Shahed and Gerber series.
The remains of the unmanned aerial vehicle found in the village of Polatycze mark the third such case this year. On August 20, in the village of Osiny in Łuków County, the first such object exploded near residential buildings. The Prosecutor’s Office indicated that it may have come from Belarus, whose airspace is also penetrated by Russian aerial attack assets during strikes on targets in Ukraine (Unknown object exploded in Osiny, Lublin Voivodeship).
