BREAKING: 2 Dead After Missiles Hit #NATO Member #Poland – #UkraineRussiaWar—-Two people have been killed in Poland after explosions hit a farm near the border with Ukraine in what is thought to be a botched Russian missile attack.
Twin explosions rang out this afternoon in Przewodów, a rural village located five miles from the Ukrainian border in south western Poland.
A senior US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the fatal blasts were caused by a pair of wayward Russian missiles – though the blast site sits more than 10 miles from the nearest Ukrainian urban settlement of note, Chervonohrad.
However, a Polish journalist from Radio ZET who initially reported the explosions claimed they may have been caused by the remnants of Russian missiles shot down over Ukraine which simply landed on Polish soil.
The blasts came as Moscow launched fresh missile attacks across Ukraine today in what Kyiv said was the heaviest wave of missile strikes in nearly nine months of war.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has called an urgent meeting of a government committee for national security and defence affairs amid the news, a government spokesman said.
Polish government spokesman Piotr Mueller did not immediately confirm U.S. intelligence reports of the missile strike, but did say top leaders were holding an emergency meeting due to a ‘crisis situation.’
Pentagon spokesman Big. Gen. Patrick Ryder said in a statement that the U.S. is still looking into the reported missile strikes in Poland, a NATO member, but added: ‘we’ve been crystal clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory.’
Poland is a member of NATO which maintains a ‘collective defence policy’, meaning that an attack on one nation in the security bloc is an attack on all.
Article 5 of the Washington treaty – NATO’s founding agreement – stipulates that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, ‘each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked’.
Russia’s defence ministry meanwhile denied reports that Russian missiles had landed on Polish soil, describing them as ‘a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation’.
It added in a statement: ‘No strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish state border were made by Russian means of destruction.’
A pair of blasts are reported to have rang out in Przewodów, a rural village located less than ten miles from the Ukrainian border in south western Poland. The aftermath of the explosions, which killed two, is pictured.
Polish president Andrzej Duda is pictured. Polish officials were called into an emergency meeting following the news that a pair of Russian missiles had hit a village near the border with Ukraine, killing two
Ukraine’s foreign minister called for NATO members to convene an ‘immediate’ summit to bring tough measures against Moscow following the reports Russian missiles had landed in Poland.
‘A collective response to Russian actions must be tough and principled. Among immediate actions: a NATO summit with Ukraine’s participation to craft further joint actions, which will force Russia to change its course on escalation, providing Ukraine with modern aircraft,’ Dmytro Kuleba said in a statement on Twitter.
Russia unleashed one of its largest missile barrages to date at Ukraine today, leaving the country’s energy network ‘critical’ with rolling blackouts.
More than 100 rockets were fired at cities across the country, hitting civilian buildings and power stations, the Ukrainian air force said.
The bombardment left half of Kyiv, where at least one civilian died, and the whole city of Zhytomyr without power.
Strikes were also reported in the western city of Lviv – the closest large urban settlement to the Polish border – and caused partial blackouts.
Kharkiv, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv, Khmelnytskyi, and Ivano-Frankivsk were also targeted.
The bombardment came as German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that documents leaked from the German military said one of the country’s top generals, Eberhard Zorn, ordered the country’s army to put itself on a war footing in the face of ‘existential’ threats.
The 68-page policy paper was produced in September, according to Der Spiegel. In it, Zorn called for the complete overhaul of the German military and told commanders to prepare themselves for war.
‘Attacks on Germany can potentially occur without warning and with great, possibly even existential, damage,’ he wrote.
Attacks on Ukraine today came just hours after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky – speaking via videolink from Kyiv – told world leaders at the G20 Bali summit that he is ready to end the war provided Russia withdraws its troops from areas it currently occupies.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov – speaking later at the summit in Indonesia – accused the West of waging ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine and Kyiv of ‘prolonging’ the conflict, without mentioning Russia’s own involvement in the fighting.
‘There is an attack on the capital. According to preliminary information, two residential buildings were hit in the Pechersk district,’ Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
‘Several missiles were shot down over Kyiv by air defence systems. Medics and rescuers are at the scene of the strikes.’
Moments later, he added: ‘Another hit in the Pechersk district. Multi-storey building.’
Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s staff, said the attack was a response to the president addressing the G20 – ramping up pressure on Russia to stop its attacks.
‘Does anyone seriously think that the Kremlin really wants peace? It wants obedience. But at the end of the day, terrorists always lose,’ Yermak said.
Russian forces have in recent weeks been targeting energy infrastructure across Ukraine and has launched barrages of missiles and swarms of drones.
Around a third of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity has been taken out, causing rolling blackouts across the country just as winter hits.
Kyiv was last targeted by Russian forces nearly one month ago on October 17.
Russia faced mounting diplomatic pressure Tuesday to end its war in Ukraine, as G20 allies and critics alike rued the painful global impact of nearly nine months of conflict.
A draft communique obtained by AFP showed the world’s 20 leading economies coming together to condemn the war’s effects, but still divided on apportioning blame.
The summit has shown that even Russia’s allies have limited patience with a conflict that has inflated food and energy prices worldwide and raised the spectre of nuclear war.
Firefighters work to put out a fire in a residential building hit by a Russian missile strike, amid attacks on Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the G20 just hours before the missiles hit, calling on Russia to end its invasion of his country
Risking diplomatic isolation, Russia was forced to agree that the war in Ukraine – which Moscow refuses to call a war – has ‘adversely impacted the global economy’.
It also agreed that ‘the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons’ is ‘inadmissible’, after months of its president Vladimir Putin making such threats.
The embattled Russian leader has skipped the summit, staying at home to reckon with a string of embarrassing battlefield defeats and a grinding campaign that threatens the future of his regime.
Rubbing salt in Russia’s wounds, Zelensky – fresh from a visit to liberated Kherson – delivered an impassioned video appeal to G20 leaders.
He said they could ‘save thousands of lives’ by pressing for a Russian withdrawal.
The United States and its allies used the summit to broaden the coalition against Russia’s invasion and scotch Moscow’s claims of a conflict of East versus West.
Ukraine has now reclaimed more than HALF the territory Russia had captured since war began
Ukraine has reclaimed more than 50 per cent of the territory it had lost since the beginning of the war to Russian troops, a new report has claimed.
Within a week of Vladimir Putin ordering his tanks to roll across the Ukrainian border on February 24, Russian armed convoys had paraded into north eastern Ukraine and had pulled up mere miles from the outskirts of Kyiv.
There they remained while Russian troops flooded into the south, rumbling through the Zaporizhzhia region and into Kherson where they seized the eponymous city on the Dnieper river.
Putin’s soldiers also launched a grinding offensive in the east, using WWI style tactics of heavy artillery bombardment and trench warfare to grind down Ukrainian positions and advance into the eastern Donbas region.
But by April, the tide began to turn and Ukrainian forces pushed back the fraying Russian forces outside of Kyiv, forcing them to retreat into Belarus and Putin’s defence chiefs to ‘refocus’ their efforts on the Donbas.
In the months that have followed, Ukraine’s armed forces engaged in a series of strategic counterattacks which have systematically pushed back Russian forces in the north- and south-east.
According to an analysis of Institute for the Study of War data by the New York Times, Russia currently controls around 18 per cent of Ukraine, including Donetsk and Luhansk Provinces in the east as well as Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014.
CREDIT: DAILYMAIL.CO.UK
