Two days after the violation of its airspace, Warsaw wants to raise the tone.
Poland's deputy foreign minister said Tuesday that NATO is considering the possibility of shooting down Russian missiles that come too close to the Atlantic Alliance's borders.
His government said Sunday that a Russian cruise missile fired overnight toward towns in western Ukraine had penetrated Polish airspace for 39 seconds.
The Polish Defense Minister assured that Poland had activated all its anti-aircraft systems and that the missile would have been shot down if there had been the slightest indication that it was heading towards a target on Polish territory.
On Tuesday, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Szejna was even more firm in an interview with local radio RMF24.
“Various concepts are being analyzed within NATO” since this incident, he explained, “including the fact of shooting down these missiles when they are very close to the borders” of the Atlantic Alliance, of which Poland is a member.
“It is not possible for the aggressor to impose rules on us every time,” he insisted during the interview.
“But this could only be done with the agreement of the Ukrainian side and taking into account the international consequences,” he nevertheless qualified.
“Reinforced” positions in the east of the Alliance
As for the Russian missile launch, the head of Polish diplomacy considered that it was “a deliberate act”.
Russia “knew that the missile, if it had gone further into Poland, would have been shot down,” he said.
“There would have been a counterattack.
This was planned in order to test the strength of the defense, the vigilance of the Polish armed forces.
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Warsaw deplored on Monday that the Russian Ambassador to Poland, Sergei Andreyev, ignored an official summons to the Polish Foreign Ministry following the missile incident.
The diplomat defended himself by saying that the Polish side had not provided evidence of any airspace violation, according to The Guardian.
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Poland then indicated that Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski had discussed the subject with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
During the telephone interview, the head of the Atlantic Alliance “recalled that NATO had considerably increased its vigilance and strengthened its positions on the eastern flank of the Alliance, particularly in Poland,” a senior NATO official said on Tuesday. NATO.
Poland had already reported at the end of December that a Russian missile had entered its airspace before leaving it a few minutes later, in the direction of Ukraine.
A year earlier, in December 2022, another Russian KH-55 cruise missile, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, had fallen in Poland, but its remains were only found in April 2023 by a passerby in a forest near Bydgoszcz, in the north, about 500 km from the country's eastern border.
And in November 2022, two people were killed when a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile fell on the Polish village of Przewodow, close to the Ukrainian border.