Poland missile deaths: President Joe Biden says deadly missile strike ‘unlikely’ to have been fired by Russia
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US President Joe Biden has said that the missiles which killed two civilians in Eastern Poland yesterday are “unlikely” to have been fired from Russia. The missiles hit the village of Przewodow close to the border with Ukraine.
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The missiles hit the village shortly after 3.30pm local time on Tuesday. Ukrainian and Polish officials had suggested the missile was fired by Russian forces, but the US President seemed to suggest otherwise following a meeting with G7 and NATO leaders to discuss the incident.
Mr 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."
Further to this there has been more suggestions from US officials to say that the missiles could in fact have been fired by Ukrainian forces attempting to defend themselves from a Russian attack.
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Following the incident in Przewodow, questions were raised over what NATO would do in response. Attacks on NATO member states are usually followed by NATO states meeting to plan what their next step will be.
The initial concern was that the missile attack could be addressed using NATO’s Article 5 which means that an attack on a NATO state is an attack on all of NATO’s allies. This could have seen a swift increase in military activity.
However, the Polish President Andrzej Duda has said his country is acting calm and will most likely instead invoke Article 4 which gives a NATO country the chance to raise a security issue and have it discussed with other members.
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He said: "We do not have any conclusive evidence at the moment as to who launched this missile... it was most likely a Russian-made missile, but this is all still under investigation at the moment."
He also said that it seems unlikely there will be a repeat of the incident: "We are acting very calmly. What happened was a one-off incident. There are no indications that there will be a repeat."
Russia has denied any involvement in the missile incident.
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