Western foreign ministries and general staffs were stunned Wednesday night when reports spread that a missile had crashed in Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border, killing two people. Meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the G20 leaders immediately addressed the issue. French President Emmanuel Macron said he had contacted Warsaw, and the British Prime Minister expressed “solidarity” with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
It must be said that the subject is very sensitive. The first elements revealed by Poland reported a “Russian-made” missile, suggesting the possibility of a shot from Moscow on a NATO member country.
However, under Article 5 of the Atlantic Alliance treaty, an armed attack against a member country is considered an aggression directed against all signatory countries, including France and the United States, paving the way for a military response.
An ‘unlikely’ Russian shot
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately took the possibility of a Russian fire for granted. I also estimated that the incident was not “rien d’autre qu’un message from Russia addressed the G20 event”, ajoutant aux leaders réunis à Bali qu’un “État terroriste est parmi vous, contre lequel il faut fend”.
But at night, when a team of investigators was immediately dispatched to the Polish village of Przewodow, where the missile crashed, the possibility of a shot coming from Moscow gradually came into question. First, the Kremlin denied being behind it. The Russian Defense Ministry assured that “no attacks were carried out against targets close to the Ukrainian-Polish border.”
From Bali in Indonesia, US President Joe Biden even added that “preliminary information” called into question the hypothesis of a shooting by Moscow.
“It is unlikely that it was sent from Russia,” he continued.
And as reported by the AP agency this Wednesday morning, several US officials would now rely, based on the first elements of the investigation, on a missile fired by the Ukrainians.
Missed Ukrainian return fire?
On Tuesday, the Russians fired missiles, “more than a hundred”, at several Ukrainian cities. Kyiv, Odessa or even Lviv, a city near the border with Poland, were attacked. The Ukrainians managed to intercept much of the Russian fire, thanks to their anti-aircraft defense system. But it cannot be ruled out that one of these return fires missed its target and crashed into Polish territory.
“A Russian-made missile may have been fired by Russia, but also by Ukraine because kyiv uses Soviet-made missiles to intercept Russian missiles fired on its soil,” said Thierry Arnaud, a BFMTV international politics columnist.
The Polish president himself, Andrzej Duda, redoubled his precautions and stressed that at this stage there was no “equivocal evidence.” And this Wednesday, the Élysée Palace called for “the greatest caution”, recalling that “many countries” in the region had the same type of missile.
A shot in the field
“As of last night, we analyzed recoverable parts and it was established that it was a part of an S300 air defense missile,” Xavier Tytelman, a former military aviator, added on BFMTV. Even according to the expert, this type of weapon does not have enough range to come from Russia, or even from Belarus, a neighboring country of Ukraine and Poland, an ally of Moscow.
Therefore, caution is maintained to know where the missile is coming from. But the thesis of a deliberate attack by Moscow on a NATO member country is not preferred.
“Such an act would be extremely serious. We don’t see why the Russians would have done it now, and especially in this place, in the middle of the countryside,” Claude Blanchemaison, a former French ambassador to Moscow, told BFMTV.
However, for the former diplomat, even if the shooting was carried out by the Ukrainians, the responsibility for the incident in Poland lies partly with Moscow. “The main responsibility comes from the fact that it was the Russians who attacked Ukrainian territory with 100 missiles,” he added on BFMTV.
Source: BFM TV
