Poland said what was likely a “Russian-made missile” crashed on a town in the country’s east on Tuesday, killing two people, but there was “no definitive evidence” on who had launched it. As its NATO allies prepared to conduct an emergency conference to address the strike,
The country called a meeting of its national security council after the missile fell on Przewodow, roughly six kilometers (3-1/2 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
“We do not have any conclusive evidence at the moment as to who launched this missile … it was most likely a Russian-made missile, but this is all still under investigation at the moment,” President Andrzej Duda told reporters.
Duda said it was very likely that Poland would request consultations under Article 4 at a meeting of NATO. Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau summoned the Russian ambassador and “demanded immediate detailed explanations”, the foreign ministry said.
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Many global leaders are attending the Group of 20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali, and US President Joe Biden, who is in Bali, said he had already spoken on the phone with Duda.
Biden told Duda that Washington has an “ironclad commitment to NATO” and will support Poland’s investigation, the White House said after the call.
A group including Biden, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held an early morning discussion on the situation and loss of life. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was also in attendance although Japan is not a member of NATO.
The leaders were pictured around a conference table at the start of the meeting. Afterwards, Biden told reporters that early information suggested the explosion might not have been caused by a missile fired from Russia.
“There is preliminary information that contests that. I don’t want to say that until we completely investigate it but it is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia but we’ll see,” Biden said.
