Deadly stray missile in Poland ‘not Russian’
BRUSSELS/PRZEWODOW: A missile that hit eastern Poland killing two people was likely caused by a Ukrainian air defence missile, NATO and Poland said on Wednesday, adding there is “absolutely no indication” for a deliberate attack or that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against NATO.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, however, said that incident happened because of Russia’s war against Ukraine, whose air defense missile went astray.
“An investigation into this incident is ongoing and we need to await its outcome. But we have no indication that this was the result of a deliberate attack,” Stoltenberg told reporters after emergency talks between NATO envoys.
NATO ambassadors were holding emergency talks to respond to the blast on Tuesday that killed two people at a grain facility in Poland near the Ukrainian border, the war’s first deadly spillover onto the territory of the Western military alliance.
Stoltenberg said that NATO has “no indication that Russia is preparing action” against any member of the 30-nation military alliance.
“This is not Ukraine’s fault, Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda too said that the missile was likely Ukrainian, followed by similar suggestions by the United States.
“From the information that we and our allies have, it was an S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union, an old rocket and there is no evidence that it was launched by the Russian side,” Poland’s Duda said. “It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz
Morawiecki said Warsaw might not need to activate Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty, which calls for consultations when a country considers its security under threat.
Earlier, US President Joe Biden said publicly that the missile was unlikely to have been fired from Russia.
A NATO official aware of the matter said that Biden had told allies that the missile was a Ukrainian air defence missile, and a Western diplomat confirmed that this was now the prevalent theory. “I’m going to make sure we find out exactly what happened,” Biden said.
The incident occurred while Russia was firing scores of missiles at cities across Ukraine, in what Ukraine says was the biggest volley of such strikes of the ninemonth war.
Kyiv says it shot down most of the incoming Russian missiles with its own air defence missiles. Ukraine’s Volyn region, just across the border from Poland, was one of the many Ukraine says was targeted by Russia’s countrywide attacks. The Russian Defence Ministry said none of its missiles had struck closer than 35 km (20 miles) from the Polish border, and that photos of the wreckage in Poland showed elements of a Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile. Asked whether it was too early to say if the missile was fired from Russia, Biden said: “There is preliminary information that contests that. I don’t want to say that until we completely investigate it, but it is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia, but we’ll see.”
The United States and NATO countries would fully investigate before acting, Biden said in Indonesia after meeting other Western leaders on the sidelines of a summit of the G20 big economies.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that some countries had made “baseless statements” about the incident, but that Washington had been comparatively restrained. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia had nothing to do with the incident, which he said had been caused by an S-300 air defence system.
In a tweet issued hours after the incident, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy blamed it on “Russian missile terror”. There was no immediate Ukrainian response on Wednesday to the reports that Washington now suspected it was in fact a stray Ukrainian missile.