President Joe Biden stated this past Wednesday that on Wednesday, a missile that landed in Poland was very “unlikely” to have been fired by Russia.
The missile smashed into the farm that sits roughly 15 miles inside the Polish borders, killing two people, and kicking off a massive discussion about the possibility of reconvening NATo members in order to find out if a strong military response was warranted due to the group’s Article 5.
The Associated Press first issued a report about the missile strike early Tuesday morning in the wake of one senior U.S. official expressing to the outlet that Russia was responsible for the firing of the missiles.
“There is preliminary information that contests that,” Biden comments later to a group of reporters while overseas when questioned about if the missile had actually been an attack from Russia. “It is unlikely in the lines of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia, but we’ll see.”
After further investigation, it seems as though the missile in question, which Poland stated was “Russian-made,” was actually used by Ukrainian forces in an effort to shoot down another Russian missile, missed, and flew past the target before landing in the farm and detonating, expressed a preliminary assessment reported by the AP.
Almost immediately, Russian government officials started to push back against the narrative that they had been the ones responsible for the missile once the report from the AP went public.
“No strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish state border were made by Russian means of destruction,” explained the Defense Ministry of Russia. “The ministry called the reports “deliberate provocation(s) aimed at escalating the situation.”
While taking part in a Tuesday press conference, the Department of Defense asserted that they could not actually confirm the original report from the AP which stated that Russia was the one responsible for the missiles.
“We are aware of the press reports alleging that two Russian missiles have struck a location inside Poland near the Ukraine border,” explained Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon. “I can tell you that we don’t have any information at this time to corroborate those reports and are looking into this further.”
Ryder went on, “When it comes to our security commitments and Article 5, we’ve been crystal clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory.”
NATO was originally created with the express purpose of stopping the attempts of the then-Soviet Union to push out into Eastern Europe and any other areas by pulling together member nations in a collective defense force against attacks via Article 5.
