Ukraine live briefing: Kyiv seeks to join probe into fatal Poland blast that West says was probably caused by Ukraine’s defenses
2 years ago
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Ukrainian officials are tallying the damage from a massive barrage of Russian missile strikes across the country earlier this week that spilled over into Poland, with an explosion that Warsaw and U.S. and other Western officials concluded Wednesday was probably caused by a stray Ukrainian air defense missile.
“The Ukrainian position is very transparent: We strive to establish all the details, every fact,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said Wednesday, calling for Ukrainian specialists to join an international investigation into the Nov. 15 incident, which killed two people. Earlier, he said he had “no doubt” the missile did not originate in Ukraine.
Asked by a Reuters reporter early Thursday about Zelensky’s assertion that Ukraine was not involved, President Biden said: “That’s not the evidence.” Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, continued to frame Ukrainian statements about the alleged involvement of Russian missiles as a “deliberate provocation” designed to escalate the war.
Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.
1. Key developments
The U.S. intelligence community has information substantiating that the explosion in Poland was from at least one or as many as two Ukrainian SA-10 surface-to-air missiles that went off course, a person familiar with the intelligence told The Washington Post on Thursday. Ukrainian missiles are older and less reliable than the ground-based missile defense weapons systems, such as NASAMS, that Kyiv has received from the West.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Polish President Andrzej Duda both reached the same conclusion Wednesday, even as they emphasized that Russia bore the ultimate responsibility for having unleashed the barrage of missiles that required Ukraine to defend itself.
A court in the Netherlands is set to rule Thursday in a trial involving four men with ties to Russia accused of involvement in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. The plane was flying over a region at the center of fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces — a forerunner to the current conflict. Nearly 300 passengers and crew were killed. Moscow denies any role.
2. Battleground updates
Ukraine’s military said Wednesday that Russia launched more than 90 missiles and nearly a dozen drones on the day of the explosion in Poland, while its air force reported that 75 missiles and 10 drones were shot down that day. Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Russian forces probably used a “substantial portion” of their high-precision weapons in the attacks.
Ukrainian officials are working to restore services including electricity, water, communications, financial, social and medical services to parts of the Kherson region that have been liberated by Ukrainian forces. Electricity has been restored to more than 20 settlements previously occupied by Moscow’s troops, according to Zelensky.
3. Global impact
Michal Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Warsaw office, said the incident in Poland is likely to galvanize Ukraine’s allies as they weigh calls for more robust antimissile defense support. “The question now,” he said, “is how do we, with the Ukrainians, stop Russian air and missile attacks throughout Ukraine and if they spill over to NATO territory?”
A U.N. meeting Wednesday to discuss grain shipments from Ukrainian and Russian ports descended into an argument between representatives from Kyiv and Moscow over the explosion in Poland. The agreement expires Nov. 19, and Ukraine and Western nations are pressing for it to be extended to avoid a global food crisis.
4. From our correspondents
Border village in east Poland hit by deadly fallout from war next door. Residents in this sleepy Polish village of about 400 people had become accustomed to living on the edge of a country at war. “We had been in a stressful situation since the beginning of the war — we had a lot of refugees at first,” said its mayor, Grzegorz Drewnik. “We got used to it.”
But a when a missile hit a grain silo Tuesday afternoon, killing two local men, they were left reeling, Post correspondent Loveday Morris reports from Przewodow, Poland.
