PRZEWODOW, Poland — Western leaders played
down fears Wednesday that a deadly missile blast in eastern Poland could herald
a dangerous escalation in the war Russia launched against
Ukraine, blaming
stray anti-aircraft fire.
اضافة اعلان
Poland and
NATO said the explosion was likely caused
by a Ukrainian air defense missile launched to intercept a Russian barrage, but
that Moscow was ultimately to blame for starting the conflict.
Two people were killed on Tuesday when at least one
missile hit a village in NATO member Poland near the Ukrainian border, during a
mass Russian bombardment aimed at civilian infrastructure inside Ukraine.
Both the Western leaders at the G20 summit in Bali
and NATO ambassadors in
Brussels called emergency meetings, amid fears the
blasts were a Russian strike that might force the allies to respond.
But Polish President Andrzej Duda played down
international fears of a further escalation, saying there was “no indication
that this was an intentional attack on Poland”.
Duda said it was very likely that the Soviet-era
missile was launched by Ukraine in what he called an “unfortunate accident” and
said the blame lay with Russia because of its attacks on Ukraine.
Russia ‘bears responsibility’
NATO chief
Jens Stoltenberg underlined this stance and EU diplomats meeting in Brussels praised Warsaw for
its measured response.
After crisis talks in Brussels, Stoltenberg said an
ongoing investigation was expected to find “that the incident was likely caused
by a Ukrainian air defense missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory against
Russian cruise missile attacks.
“But let me be clear, this is not Ukraine’s fault,”
he continued. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal
war against Ukraine.”
Stoltenberg said NATO had ramped up its defenses
along its eastern flank in response to the war in Ukraine and denied that the
alliance’s air defenses had failed.
“We are prepared to handle situations like this in a
firm, calm, resolute way, but also in a way that prevent further escalation,”
he said.
The NATO chief said Poland had not invoked Article 4
of the Western alliance’s treaty, which would have obliged members to discuss
whether “the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any
of the parties is threatened”.
NATO’s most powerful member, the US, has hundreds of
troops in Poland and leads the West in supplying weapons to support Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said American
personnel would work to support the Polish investigation, and stressed: “Russia
bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”
The Russian defense ministry said: “Photographs of
the wreckage ... were unequivocally identified by Russian military experts as
fragments of a guided anti-aircraft missile of a Ukrainian S-300 air defense
system.”
It insisted that its own strikes, a barrage of
scores of missiles, “were carried out on targets only on the territory of
Ukraine and at a distance of no closer than 35km from the Ukrainian-Polish
border.”
With world leaders meeting in Bali at the
G20 summit, Ukrainian officials initially insisted that Russia must have fired the
missile that hit Poland.
Zelensky was quick to blame Moscow for what he
termed “Russian missile terror”, but Ukraine later asked to take part in the
investigation.
“Ukraine requests immediate access to the site of
the explosion,” the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defense
council, Oleksiy Danilov, said on social media.
He said Kyiv was ready to hand over evidence of its
claim that Russia was responsible, but that he was “expecting information from
our partners” on reports that it was a Ukrainian missile.
The explosion rocked the village of Przewodow in
eastern Poland at 2:40pm GMT on Tuesday.
Electricity outages
Russia invaded Ukraine on
February 24 and still holds swathes of territory despite a series of recent
battlefield defeats.
The conflict has caused deep unease in neighboring
Poland, which shares a 530km border with Ukraine and where memories of Soviet
domination are still very raw.
The explosion came after a wave of Russian missiles
hit cities across Ukraine on Tuesday, including Lviv, near the Polish border.
Zelensky said the strikes cut power to some 10
million people, though it was later restored to 8 million of them, and also
triggered automatic shutdowns at two nuclear power plants.
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