The White House on Wednesday blamed Russia after officials confirmed a Ukrainian missile landed and exploded in Poland, triggering a flurry of discussions and emergency meetings on Tuesday.
“We have seen nothing that contradicts President [Andrezj] Duda’s preliminary assessment that this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defense missile that unfortunately landed in Poland,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
“That said, whatever the final conclusions may be, it is clear that the party ultimately responsible for this tragic incident is Russia, which launched a barrage of missiles on Ukraine specifically intended to target civilian infrastructure. Ukraine had—and has—every right to defend itself,” Watson added.
NATO officials and the Polish government confirmed that the missile was of Ukrainian origin and wasn’t a Russian attack. Anonymously sourced reports on Tuesday indicated that the missile was fired by Russia before it landed in a Polish border village, killing two people.
Duda told reporters that Ukrainian forces launched missiles in a defensive manner after Russia launched a barrage of strikes across the country. He said that it is “highly probable” that one of those Ukrainian missiles hit Polish territory.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, at a meeting of the 30-nation military alliance in Brussels, echoed the preliminary Polish findings.
Earlier Wednesday, President Joe Biden told reporters that it was not likely that Russia fired the missile that landed in Poland.
Dispute
Yet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy disputed the preliminary findings and demanded evidence. He told reporters he had “no doubts” about a report he said he had personally received from his top commanders “that it wasn’t our missile or our missile strike.”Kyiv officials should have access to the site and take part in the investigation, he added. A day before, Zelenskyy said the strike was a “very significant escalation” in the monthslong conflict.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense on Tuesday denied reports that its missiles hit Polish territory and said the incident was a false flag designed at escalating the war, according to state-run media outlets.
“No strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish state border were made by Russian means of destruction,” the statement said, adding that debris reportedly found at the scene “has nothing to do with Russian weapons.”
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman in Moscow said no Russian strike Tuesday was closer than 35 kilometers (22 miles) from the Ukraine-Poland border. The Kremlin denounced Poland’s and other countries’ initial response and, in rare praise for a U.S. leader, hailed Biden’s “restrained, much more professional reaction.”
“We have witnessed another hysterical, frenzied, Russo-phobic reaction that was not based on any real data,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The Polish incident occurred as Russia was shelling Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kyiv government and U.S. officials.
