Updated: 2:50pm (AEST)
Warsaw, Poland/Kyiv, Ukraine
Reuters
A missile that killed two people in Poland was probably not fired from Russia, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday after an emergency meeting of NATO leaders called to discuss what Poland called a strike by a Russia-made projectile.
The explosion on Tuesday at a grain facility near the Ukrainian border came as Russia unleashed a wave of missile attacks targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure, raising concerns the conflict could spill into neighbouring countries.
A view shows damages after an explosion in Przewodow, a village in eastern Poland near the border with Ukraine, in this image obtained from social media by Reuters released on 15th November. PICTURE: via Reuters
The Polish foreign ministry said the rocket fell on Przewodow, a village about six kilometres from the border with Ukraine. Russia denied it was responsible for the explosion but Polish officials said the missile was Russian-made.
A resident who declined to be identified said the two victims were men who were near the weighing area of a grain facility.
A Russian strike on Poland could risk widening the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are committed to collective defence under its Article 5.
Biden convened a meeting of leaders gathered for the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to discuss the incident. Leaders from NATO members Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France and Britain attended, as well as non-NATO member Japan and representatives from the European Union.
Asked whether it was too early to say if the missile was fired from Russia, Biden said: “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.”
The United States and NATO countries would fully investigate before acting, Biden said.
The explosion in Poland came as Russia pounded cities across Ukraine with missiles, in attacks that Kyiv said were the heaviest wave of strikes in nearly nine months of war. Some hit Lviv, which is less than 80 kilometres
from the border with Poland.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russian missiles hit Poland in a “significant escalation” of the conflict. He did not provide evidence of Russia’s involvement.
“All of Europe and the world must be fully protected from terrorist Russia,” he said in a tweet after a phone call with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Two European diplomats said Poland requested a NATO meeting under the treaty’s Article 4 for consultations among the allies. Poland was also increasing the readiness of some military units, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said.
Polish officials sought to avoid inflaming the situation. Morawiecki called on all Poles to remain calm, and President Duda said there was no concrete evidence showing who fired the missile and that it was a one-off incident.
Biden told Duda in a call that Washington has an “ironclad commitment to NATO” and will support Poland’s investigation, the White House said.
Police block a road, amid reports of two explosions, in Przewodow, Poland, on 15th November. PICTURE: Jakub Orzechowski/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via Reuters
The Associated Press earlier cited a senior US intelligence official as saying the blast was due to Russian missiles having crossed into Poland.
But in Washington, the Pentagon, White House and US State Department said they could not corroborate the report and were working with the Polish Government to gather more information. The State Department said the report was “incredibly concerning.”
Germany and Canada said they were monitoring the situation, and the European Union, the Netherlands and Norway said they were seeking more details. French President Emmanuel Macron ordered a verification effort, while Britain was “urgently” looking into the report.
Russian denial
Russia’s defence ministry denied that Russian missiles hit Polish territory, describing such reports as “a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he had no information on an explosion in Poland.
Latvian Deputy Prime Minister Artis Pabriks said the situation was “unacceptable” and it could lead to NATO providing more anti-aircraft defences to Poland and Ukraine.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said on Twitter: “Every inch of #NATO territory must be defended!”
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said Kyiv had warned of the danger Russian missiles posed to neighbouring countries and called for a no-fly zone to be imposed.
“We were asking to close the sky, because sky has no borders. Not for uncontrolled missiles. Not for the threat they carry for our EU & NATO neighbours. Gloves are off. Time to win,” he said in a Twitter post.
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Explosions across Ukraine
Meanwhile, air raid sirens blared and explosions rang out in nearly a dozen major Ukrainian cities, echoing a pattern in recent weeks of Moscow lashing out far from the front after losses on the battlefield, most recently the major southern city of Kherson.
Russia had launched 110 missiles and 10 Iranian-made attack drones into Ukraine by early evening, Ukraine’s armed forces General Staff said in a statement.
Zelenskiy said the main target of the missile flurry was energy infrastructure, as before, though added that only 10 intended targets in all had been hit.
“It’s clear what the enemy wants. He will not achieve this,” he said in a video address on the Telegram messaging app. Kyiv has said such strikes only stiffen its resolve to repel Russian forces that invaded in February.
Firefighters work to put out a fire in a residential building hit by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 15th November. PICTURE: Reuters/Oleksandr Gusev
In the capital Kyiv, flames funnelled out of a five-storey apartment block after being hit by what residents said appeared to be shot-down pieces of missile. The emergency service said one person was confirmed killed and another injured. Kyiv’s mayor said half the capital was left without electricity.
Other strikes or explosions were reported in cities ranging from Lviv and Zhytomyr in the west to Kryvy Rih in the south and Kharkiv in the east. Regional officials reported some of the attacks had knocked out electricity, water and heating.
The attacks had left millions of Ukrainians without energy in 16 of the country’s 24 regions including Kyiv, the UN humanitarian office (OCHA) said in a statement.
Bunkers abandoned
Just four days ago Russian troops abandoned Kherson city in the south, the only regional capital Moscow had captured since its invasion, and six weeks after President Vladimir Putin declared it an eternal part of Russia.
Moscow had said last week its troops would occupy positions easier to defend on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River that bisects Ukraine. But video images filmed in the town of Oleshky, across a collapsed bridge from Kherson, appeared to show Russian forces had vacated their bunkers there too.
Further east, Russian-installed administrators said they were pulling civil servants out of Kherson province’s second biggest city, Nova Kakhovka, on the river bank next to a huge, strategic dam.
Natalya Humenyuk, a Ukrainian military spokesperson, said Moscow seemed to be repositioning troops and artillery 15 to 20 kilometres further from the Dnipro, to protect its guns from Ukrainian counter-strikes.
Russia had artillery still capable of striking Kherson from those new positions, but “we also have something to answer with”, she said.
The war was one focus of the G20 summit, where Western leaders denounced Moscow. Russia is a member and Ukraine is not, but Putin stayed home.
Speaking to the gathering, Zelenskiy reiterated longstanding demands that Russia withdraw all forces, free all prisoners and reaffirm Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for peace.
He proposed indefinitely extending a programme to safeguard Ukrainian grain exports to help feed poor countries, expanding it to the port of Mykolaiv, newly beyond reach of Russian guns after the Kherson advance.
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Western countries sought a summit declaration that would condemn the war despite Russian opposition and a lack of unanimity. Diplomats circulated a 16-page draft that said: “Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s delegation head in Putin’s absence, accused the West of trying to politicise the declaration.
– With JONATHAN LANDAY, TOM BALMFORTH, ANNA KOPER, PAWEL FLORKIEWICZ and Reuters bureaux; Additional reporting by SABINE SIEBOLD in Berlin, Germany, Nandita Bose in Bali, Indonesia, and TREVOR HUNNICUTT in Washington DC, US.
