What is known about the missile that has hit Poland and left two dead?

A missile explosion in NATO member Poland that Ukraine blamed on Russia has raised fears of a deeper confrontation between the US-led military alliance and Russia amid the deadliest war in Europe since World War II.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
16 November 2022 Wednesday 12:30
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What is known about the missile that has hit Poland and left two dead?

A missile explosion in NATO member Poland that Ukraine blamed on Russia has raised fears of a deeper confrontation between the US-led military alliance and Russia amid the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. .

However, the missile was likely fired by Ukraine's air defenses and not by a Russian attack, Poland and NATO said on Wednesday, allaying global concerns that the war in Ukraine could cross the border. Many NATO allies called for full investigations and the alliance called an emergency meeting.

What do we know and what do we not know about the incident?

The first news of the incident was reported by Polish radio ZET, which said on Tuesday that two stray missiles hit Przewodow, a town in eastern Poland about six kilometers (3.5 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

According to the Polish Foreign Ministry, a Russian-made missile struck an area of ​​the town at 3:40 p.m. local time (1440 GMT) after a day of heavy Russian missile strikes in Ukraine. The two men who died were near a grain facility in Przewodow.

The NATO secretary general, the president and the prime minister of Poland said the explosion was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile.

Polish President Andrzej Duda said it was an S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, adding that the explosion could have been a side effect related to the missile hitting the ground and the fuel ignition.

From the outset, Russia denied that its missiles hit Poland.

He said Tuesday's explosion had been caused by a Ukrainian air defense missile and that Russian strikes in Ukraine had been no closer than 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Polish border.

Moscow said on Wednesday that it had nothing to do with the explosion. The Kremlin accused some Western countries, especially Poland, of reacting "hysterically" to the incident, but said the United States and President Joe Biden had shown restraint.

Images of the wreckage have been identified by Russian defense industry specialists as elements of an anti-aircraft guided missile of the Ukrainian air force's S-300 air defense system, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

It was not clear whether Moscow had used a Cold War hotline, set up after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to talk to Washington and defuse the situation. President Vladimir Putin has yet to comment on the incident.

The United States and its NATO allies are investigating the explosion in Przewodow, but early reports suggested it might not have been caused by a missile launched from Russia, US President Joe Biden said overnight.

Asked if it was too early to say any missiles were fired from Russia, Biden said the trajectory suggested otherwise. "There is preliminary information that refutes that," he told reporters. "I don't want to say that until we fully investigate it, but it's unlikely ... it was fired from Russia, but we'll see," he said.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday that the United States would work with Poland to gather more information about the explosion, but did not blame the country led by Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine wants access to the blast site in Poland, a top Kyiv defense official said on Wednesday, a day after the government blamed Russia.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said Kyiv wanted a joint study of Tuesday's incident with its partners and to see the information that provided the basis for its allies' conclusions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday, without presenting evidence, that Russian missiles had hit NATO country Poland in what he called a "significant escalation" of the conflict sparked by the Russian invasion.

Danilov also said Ukraine has evidence of a "Russian trace" in the Przewodow incident and echoed Zelensky in blaming Russia's "missile terror." Danilov did not provide details about what evidence he was citing.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Wednesday that Warsaw may not need to activate Article 4 of the NATO treaty, which requires consultations when a member country considers its security threatened.

After an emergency meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels, the alliance's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said an investigation was underway into the incident.