Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg has said there is “no indication” that a missile that struck Poland killing two people was a “deliberate attack”, saying it was likely fired by Ukraine while defending itself against a barrage of Russian weapons.
Poland and the US separately announced they had reached the same conclusion.
Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, told a press conference in Brussels that the western military alliance also had “no indication that Russia is preparing offensive military actions against Nato”.
Moscow denied responsibility for the strike in the village of Przewodów near the Ukrainian border on Tuesday afternoon, which came during Russia’s biggest missile attack on Ukraine in weeks. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and some western nations initially blamed Russia for launching the missile, which Warsaw said was a strike by a “Russian-made missile”.
Zelenskyy continued to insist on Wednesday that it was not a Ukrainian weapon.
But Stoltenberg said: “Our preliminary analysis suggests that the incident was likely caused by Ukrainian air defence missile fired to defend Ukrainian territory against Russian cruise missile attacks.”
However, he added: “This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears responsibility for what happened in Poland yesterday because this is a direct result of the ongoing war, and the wave of attacks from Russia against Ukraine yesterday.
“Ukraine has the right to shoot down those missiles that are targeting Ukrainian cities and critical Ukrainian infrastructure.”
Andrzej Duda, Polish president, told a press conference in Poland on Wednesday that investigators believed that “most likely” it had been a Russian-made missile produced in the 1970s, the S300. “We have no evidence that it was launched by Russia.”
The White House backed Warsaw’s view. “We have seen nothing that contradicts President Duda’s preliminary assessment that this explosion was most likely the result of a Ukrainian air defence missile that unfortunately landed in Poland,” US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said.
Zelenskyy rejected the Nato, Polish and US assessments. “I have no doubt from the evening report to me personally — from the commander of the air force to commander-in-chief [of Ukraine’s military Gen Valerii] Zaluzhny — that it was not our missile or our missile strike,” he said on Wednesday evening. “It makes no sense for me not to trust them, I’ve gone through the war with them.”
The president also repeated calls by his national security chief, Oleksiy Danilov, for Ukrainian investigators to be given access to the crash site.
“If, God forbid, some [missile] debris killed these people, we have to apologise,” he said. “But, sorry, first [I want] an investigation, access, the data you have — we want to have this.”
The area around the strike, which local media said used to be an agriculture co-operative during the Communist era, was cordoned off by the Polish authorities. Residents were quoted in the Polish press as saying the victims were farm workers in their 60s.
Photos on social media showed a damaged vehicle lying next to a large crater.
Dmitry Peskov, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, told reporters on Wednesday that the initial claims of Russian responsibility from Kyiv and some western allies were “yet another hysterical, rabidly Russophobic reaction that was not based on any real information”.
Russia insisted it did not fire on any targets close to the Polish border and said that any damage to civilians was Kyiv’s fault.
The defence ministry said it had not even fired on Kyiv during the day’s barrage, and said the incident in Poland was a “deliberate provocation with the goal of escalating the situation”.
In his press conference, Stoltenberg declined to give details of what led to the incident, stressing that it remained subject to an investigation, but he confirmed that preliminary analysis pointed to a Ukrainian air defence system.
“This incident does not have the characteristics of an attack,” he said, adding that it had not changed Nato’s fundamental assessment of the threat to the alliance. A top priority was to provide more air defence systems to Ukraine.
While consultations under Article 4 of the military alliance’s treaty can be invoked when the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the members is threatened, this has not been demanded thus far, Stoltenberg confirmed.
“Allies agree on the approach. There has been no call for an Article 4 meeting. That is based on the findings, based on the analysis, and based on the results so far of the ongoing investigation,” he said.
Sam Fleming in Brussels, Raphael Minder and Barbara Erling in Warsaw, Christopher Miller, Felicia Schwartz and Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv and Max Seddon in Riga
Credit: Source link
