Poland's air defence system initially detected the object but subsequently lost track of it.

Poland’s armed forces chief believes a Russian missile entered Poland for almost three minutes and then turned back into Ukrainian airspace.

Gen Wieslaw Kukula said the missile travelled about 40km (25 miles) into Polish airspace early on Friday. The alert coincided with what Ukraine has called Russia’s biggest day of air strikes since its war began. President Andrzej Duda convened an emergency security meeting after the object was picked up on radar. About 200 police officers have been conducting a search of the area where the object was detected in case the missile landed on Polish territory.

        • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.ccEnglish
          7·
          11 months ago

          Not necessarily. NATO military tech can track rockets in real time and project a destination. If you can see a missile is headed for a sparsely populated area and unlikely to inflict casualties, then you are better off letting it go. To intercept the missile is to demonstrate your defensive capabilities. Right now, Russia is likely in the dark about that. Unclear whether showing their hand is strategically the right move for Poland.

        • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.worldEnglish
          41·
          11 months ago

          Honestly, it is a bit concerning that it couldn’t have been shot down :/

          Although having active SAM battery is probably too risky when not at war.

          • JackOfAllTraits@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11·
            11 months ago

            I mean, look, AA is a numbers game. Nato, just like Ukraine and Russia, would miss a bunch of missiles in an open war. You can never get them all

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    41·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    About 200 police officers have been conducting a search of the area where the object was detected in case the missile landed on Polish territory.

    Poland is a member of the Nato alliance, and Polish and Allied aircraft were scrambled in response to the incident at around 07:00 (06:00 GMT) on Friday.

    Krzysztof Komorski, the president of the Lublin Voivodship [equivalent to a province or region] wrote on social media: “Please be calm and patient, the services are working.”

    In a harmless but more embarrassing incident from December last year, an object believed to have been an unarmed Russian Kh-55 cruise missile was fired from Belarus and crossed around 500km of Polish territory before landing in a forest.

    The object, which was detected by Polish air defences at the time, was only found in April this year by a passer-by not far from the city of Bydgoszcz in central Poland.

    His predecessor, Mariusz Blaszczak, from the right-wing Law and Justice-led government that lost power in an election in October and served as defence minister during the two earlier events, responded: "We don’t know what fell in the area of Tomaszow Lubelski.

    The original article contains 587 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!