A missile that killed two people in Poland was unlikely to have been fired from Russia, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, after the blast raised global alarm that the Ukraine conflict could spill into neighbouring countries.
NATO ambassadors were due to hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday to respond to the explosion at a grain dryer near the Ukrainian border, which occurred while Russia was firing scores of missiles at cities across Ukraine.
Kyiv says it shot down most of the incoming Russian missiles with its own air defence missiles. Ukraine’s Volyn region, just across the border from Poland, was one of the many it says was targeted by Russia’s attacks.
The Polish foreign ministry said the rocket fell on Przewodow, a village about 6 km (4 miles) from the border with Ukraine. Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters that it was “most likely a Russian-made missile”, but that there was no concrete evidence of who fired it.
Both Russia’s long-range missiles and the air defence missiles that Ukraine fired to shoot them down are Russian-made.
Asked whether it was too early to say if the missile was fired from Russia, Biden said: “There is preliminary information that contests that. I don’t want to say that until we completely investigate it, but it is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia, but we’ll see.”
The United States and NATO countries would fully investigate before acting, Biden said, speaking in Indonesia after meeting other Western leaders on the sidelines of a summit of the G20 big economies.
( Source Reuters)
