A Russian missile struck eastern Poland early Thursday, leaving a 10-meter-wide crater in a field near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia and triggering NATO’s highest levels of alert.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said fragments recovered from the site pointed to a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile. The weapon was part of a massive overnight Russian barrage against Ukraine that killed at least 13 people across the country.
Tusk said there was no reason to believe Poland was targeted, but he confirmed the Polish military was prepared to shoot the missile down if it had threatened a populated area.
The incident began around 4 a.m., minutes after Polish air defense radars tracked a Russian missile approaching within 4.8 km (three miles) of the Polish border before turning back east. Shortly afterward, military radar detected an unidentified object moving westward inside Polish airspace. An F-16 on quick-reaction alert was scrambled, but the object dropped off radar before the pilot could make contact.
Local residents described a powerful blast. One resident told Lublin 112 that they had never heard anything like it and that the windows were almost blown out.
NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, General Alexus Grynkewich, said the alliance would continue to take all necessary measures to defend NATO territory. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it another unacceptable violation of EU airspace.
This is not the first time Russian weapons have entered Polish airspace during the war, but the crater on Polish soil makes it one of the most tangible violations. In November 2022, a missile killed two people in the Polish village of Przewodow, though that was later determined to be a Ukrainian air defense interceptor. In March 2024, a Russian cruise missile briefly crossed Polish airspace before returning to Ukraine.
The overnight attack on Ukraine was one of Russia’s largest in months. In Kryvyi Rih, an Iskander-M missile struck a private house, killing six, including two girls aged 5 and 12. Six more people died in the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions, among them two children. Twenty-six were injured in Lviv when two blocks of flats were damaged. One person was killed in Kyiv.
Russia’s defense ministry said it used land-, sea-, and air-launched missiles and strike drones against what it called military-industrial targets. Zelenskyy, who had warned Ukrainians hours earlier of a large incoming attack, repeated his plea for air defense missiles, saying the protection of people’s lives depended directly on their willingness to provide them.