- By Adam Easton
- BBC News, Warsaw
December 29, 2023, 2:57 p.m. GMT
Updated 1 hour ago
Image source: Getty Images
image description,
A missile believed to have been fired by Ukraine landed in Poland in November 2022, killing two people
The head of the Polish Armed Forces believes that a Russian missile entered Poland for almost three minutes and then returned to Ukrainian airspace.
Gen. Wieslaw Kukula said the missile flew about 40 kilometers (25 miles) into Polish airspace early Friday.
The warning coincided with what Ukraine described as Russia's biggest day of airstrikes since the start of the war.
President Andrzej Duda called an emergency meeting of security forces after the object was detected on radar.
About 200 police officers searched the area where the object was discovered in case the missile landed on Polish territory.
Poland is a member of the NATO alliance and Polish and allied aircraft were scrapped in response to the incident at around 07:00 a.m. (0600 GMT) on Friday. There are no reports of an explosion.
The command's spokesman, Lt. Col. Jacek Goryszewski, said an unknown object arrived from Ukraine near the town of Zamosc in the Lublin region of southeastern Poland, not far from the border with Poland.
He told private broadcaster TVN24 that the event may be related to Russia's missile and drone attacks on some of Ukraine's largest cities.
At least 30 people were killed in the attacks on Lviv, the closest Ukrainian city to the Lublin region, as well as on Dnipro, Kiev and other cities.
According to an unconfirmed report, a search took place near the town of Hrubieszow.
The Polish government has not ruled out a Russian provocation. “We have to check whether this was not a provocation or a test of our reaction. We should carefully consider both scenarios,” Deputy Defense Minister Stanislaw Wziatek told TVN24.
Polish military expert Commander Maksymilian Dura told TVN24 that it was premature to conclude that it was a Russian missile because it had not been found and just because contact was lost, one cannot be sure. that she had left Polish airspace.
Krzysztof Komorski, President of the Lublin Voivodeship [equivalent to a province or region] wrote on social media: “Please be calm and patient, services are working.”
Since the Russian invasion and war against Ukraine, three missiles have entered Poland.
In November 2022, two Polish farmers were killed by a rocket that landed in the village of Przewodow, near the Ukrainian border. It was believed to have been fired by Ukrainian air defense forces to repel a Russian missile attack.
In an innocuous but even more embarrassing incident in December last year, an object believed to be an unarmed Russian Kh-55 cruise missile was fired from Belarus and crossed some 500 km of Polish territory before crashing into a forest landed.
The object, discovered by Polish air defense at the time, was only found in April of this year by a passerby not far from the city of Bydgoszcz in central Poland.
Another unknown object that entered Polish airspace from Belarus this year was probably an observation balloon. Radar contact with him was lost near Rypin in central Poland.
Both sides of Polish politics used the recent event to score points.
Poland's new Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz emphasized in an article
His predecessor, Mariusz Blaszczak, of the right-wing Law and Justice government, which lost power in an October election and served as defense minister in the two earlier events, responded: “We don't know what has fallen in this area.” Tomaszow Lubelski. We don't know if anyone was injured. We don't know why the anti-aircraft systems didn't work. Is the state acting?”