- By Adam Easton
- BBC News, Warsaw
image source, Good pictures
A missile believed to have been launched by Ukraine landed in Poland in November 2022, killing two people.
Poland's armed forces chief believes the Russian missile entered Poland for nearly three minutes and then returned to Ukrainian airspace.
General Wieslaw Kukula said the missile traveled about 40 km (25 miles) over Polish airspace early Friday.
The warning coincides with what have been called Russia's biggest airstrikes since Ukraine began its war.
After the object was picked up on radar, President Andrej Duta convened an emergency security meeting.
About 200 policemen are searching the area where the missile fell on the Polish border.
Poland is a member of the NATO alliance, and Polish and allied aircraft scrambled in response to the incident at around 07:00 (06:00 GMT) on Friday. There were no reports of an explosion.
Lt. Col. Jacek Koriszewski, a spokesman for the operations command, said an unidentified object entered Poland from Ukraine near the city of Zamosk in the Lublin region of southeastern Poland, not far from the border.
He told broadcaster TVN24 that the incident could be related to Russia's missile and drone strikes against some of Ukraine's biggest cities.
At least 18 people were killed in the attacks, which targeted the Ukrainian city of Lviv and Dnipro, Kyiv and other cities closest to the Lublin region. The Polish military was monitoring the Russian missile attacks night after night.
Unconfirmed reports suggest the raid is taking place near the town of Hrubieszow.
Polish military expert Cmdr Maksymilian Dura told Polish television that it was premature to conclude that it was a Russian missile as it had not been found, and it was impossible to say for sure that it had left Polish airspace due to a loss of contact.
Krzysztof Komorski, President of the Lublin Voivodeship [equivalent to a province or region] He wrote on social media: “Please be calm and patient, services are working.”
Three missiles have entered Poland since Russia's invasion and war against Ukraine.
In November 2022, two Polish farmers were killed by a missile that landed in the village of Presvodov near the Ukrainian border. It is believed to have been fired by Ukrainian air defense forces to repel a Russian missile attack.
In a harmless but highly embarrassing incident in December last year, an object believed to be an unarmed Russian Kh-55 cruise missile was launched from Belarus, crossed 500 kilometers of Polish territory and landed in a forest.
The object, detected by Polish air defense at the time, was discovered only in April this year by a passer-by not far from the town of Bydgoszcz in central Poland.
Another unidentified object that entered Polish airspace this year from the direction of Belarus could be a surveillance balloon. Radar contact with it was lost near Rybin in central Poland.
Both sides of Poland's political arena have seized on the latest event to score points.
Poland's new defense minister, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, insisted that security forces had “acted immediately” to the latest incident in a post on Twitter called X, saying, “The government is acting!” He promised that.
“We don't know what happened,” said Tomaszow Lubelski, whose predecessor, the right-wing Law and Justice-led government, lost power in an election in October and served as defense minister during two previous incidents. We don't know if anyone was hurt. I don't know. Is the government working?”
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