World leaders gathering at the G20 summit in Bali, Thailand are attempting to defuse a potential escalation in the months-long Ukraine war after a “Russian-made” missile struck NATO-member Poland killing two people.
The missile landed outside the rural Polish village of Przewodow, just over 6 km west from the Ukrainian border on Tuesday afternoon, roughly the same time as Russia launched its biggest wave of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in more than a month.
The circumstances surrounding the incident, which marks the first time a NATO country has been directly hit during the almost nine-month conflict, remain unclear. It is not known who fired the missile, or precisely where it was fired from, though the Polish Foreign Ministry has described it as “Russian-made.”
Both Russian and Ukrainian forces have used Russian-made munitions during the conflict, with Ukraine deploying Russian-made missiles as part of their air defense system.
Speaking to reporters after holding an emergency meeting with G7 and NATO leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit, US President Joe Biden said preliminary information suggested it was “unlikely” the missile was fired from within Russia, but was unable to say conclusively until the investigation was complete.
Following Biden’s statement, a NATO military official told CNN the missile had been tracked by an alliance aircraft flying above Polish airspace at the time of the blast.
“Intel with the radar tracks [of the missile] was provided to NATO and Poland,” the NATO military official added. The NATO official did not say who launched the missile, or where it was fired from.
Russian state-owned Tass news agency is reporting that Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is satisfied with Russia’s claim that it was not involved in the incident in Poland, and that “insisting that the missiles were Russian-made will provoke this issue”
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