Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Thursday that an object that gouged a 33-foot-wide crater in a field in eastern Poland overnight was probably a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile, prompting Warsaw to scramble F-16 fighter jets and reviving the question of what NATO owes a member whose airspace is repeatedly pierced by Russia's war on Ukraine.
The impact, near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia in Lublin province about 62 miles from the Ukrainian border, came during an overnight barrage that Ukrainian officials said killed at least eight civilians. Russian drones and one unarmed Russian missile have landed on Polish soil since the 2022 invasion, but Thursday's incident is the first in which Warsaw has publicly identified a specific Russian cruise-missile type as the probable weapon.
The intercept
Poland's military detected an unidentified westbound object at about 3:40 a.m. local time and dispatched an F-16 to intercept, according to the Operational Command of the Polish Armed Forces. The object vanished from radar minutes later. Residents heard a loud bang around 4 a.m. and police reached the crash site about an hour afterward, roughly 1.2 miles from the nearest buildings.
Tusk traveled to the site. "All the indications are that it was a Russian Kh-101," he said, adding that Polish forces "were prepared to shoot it down if had continued its flight." Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said about 20 objects had been tracked near Polish airspace overnight and that pyrotechnical analysis was under way.
Ukraine's acting foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, went further than Warsaw, saying on X that a Russian Kh-101 had "crossed into Poland as part of Russia's massive strike against Ukraine, violating Nato airspace."
The barrage in Ukraine
Russia launched more than 70 missiles and roughly 280 drones overnight, striking Kyiv, the western city of Lviv and towns in the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions, Fox News reported. Six members of one family were killed near Kryvyi Rih when a home was hit by an Iskander-M ballistic missile, according to local officials. A 31-year-old man was killed in Kyiv, and at least 30 people were injured in Lviv, about 40 miles from the Polish border.
Ukraine's air force said it intercepted 55 of the missiles and 265 of the drones, but only one of nine ballistic missiles was shot down. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, back from meetings this week with President Trump on Patriot interceptor co-production, tied the toll to a shortage of Western air-defense stocks. Russian strikes had again shown "protection against the Russian missile threat is the most important task when it comes to saving the lives of our people," he said.
The caveat
Attribution is not final. Tusk told an emergency meeting in Lublin that officials wanted to be "100% certain about the type of missile and who launched it," and Fox News reported that Polish investigators had initially determined the missile "was not intended for Poland territory." The BBC noted that a missile that killed two Polish farmers in November 2022 was ultimately found to have been Ukrainian air-defense fire responding to a Russian attack, a precedent that has made Warsaw slower than Kyiv to declare a NATO airspace breach.
Tusk said U.S. investigators had asked to join the Polish inquiry, whose results will shape how far Warsaw carries the incident inside the alliance.