At least eight people were killed and dozens injured in another night of heavy Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, with casualties reported mainly in the Dnipropetrovsk and Lviv regions, where a residential building was among the sites damaged. Russia launched 74 missiles and 284 drones at targets across the country, officials said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attacks were further proof that Ukraine needs stronger protection against Russian missiles, adding that Ukraine faced a “critical shortage of air defence missiles from our partners.”
Object crashes in eastern Poland
Poland said it was investigating an object that crashed near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia in the east of the country, about 80km from the Polish-Ukrainian border, after an unidentified object was detected moving westward into Polish airspace. Local police said officers responding to reports of a loud bang found a crater and scattered debris in a field roughly 2km from the nearest buildings. Air raid sirens also sounded in the eastern city of Lublin.
The object came down just hours after Zelenskyy met Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Lublin, where the two discussed bilateral cooperation, including on antiballistic defence. Tusk said Zelenskyy had warned him beforehand that Ukraine had precise information about an upcoming large-scale Russian attack.
Tusk called the timing “an unusual coincidence” and said he was travelling to the impact site on Thursday morning.
Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, told a Polish Air Force briefing that it was “most likely” the object was a Kh-101 air-launched cruise missile, adding that Poland remained in regular contact with its NATO allies over the incident.
Maj Gen Ireneusz Nowak, the Inspector of the Polish Air Force, said Russia had fired between 20 and 22 Kh-101 missiles into Ukraine overnight as part of its wider strikes, and that two of them had been identified as posing a direct threat to Polish territory. An F-16 fighter jet was scrambled and tracked one of the missiles, observing it crash in an uninhabited area.
At an emergency meeting on Thursday, Tusk described the object as a Russian ballistic missile based on the indications gathered so far, but said Poland wanted full certainty on the type of weapon and who had launched it before drawing final conclusions.
A Polish prosecutor said Poland had received a request from Ukraine for Ukrainian specialists to help with the investigation into the object that fell in the field.
(With information from Reuters and The Guardian)
