Poland blames Russia for firing missile into its territory as Moscow unleashes deadly attack on Ukraine

By Lex Harvey, Svitlana Vlasova, Victoria Butenko, Anna Chernova, Issy Ronald, CNN

Kyiv, Ukraine (CNN) — NATO and Poland scrambled military aircraft when a missile apparently fired by Russia landed deep inside Polish territory, as Moscow launched deadly long-range attacks across Ukraine that killed at least nine people.

The missile landed and exploded about 90 kilometers (55 miles) into Polish territory early on Thursday, leaving a massive crater in the middle of a field, local authorities said.

“We were prepared to shoot down the missile if it had continued its flight,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk told an emergency government meeting, according to his office on X. “All indications suggest that it was a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile.”

Two NATO fighter jets, a NATO refueling aircraft, a Polish early warning aircraft and a Polish helicopter were deployed to counter the threat, a spokesperson for the alliance told CNN.

NATO forces were seconds away from shooting down the missile before assessing it was going to crash on its own, a senior NATO military official told CNN. There are no current plans to invoke Article 4, which would trigger a formal discussion between NATO members about taking action, the official added. That article has been invoked three times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

NATO will “continue to take all necessary measures to defend NATO territory, General Alexus G. Grynkewich, the alliance’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, said in a statement.

An intentional Russian attack so deep inside a NATO member’s territory would be an escalation in Moscow’s yearslong war on Ukraine, but there are no reasons to think Poland was the intended target, Tusk said later when he visited the crater site, according to Reuters.

Poland had earlier reported scrambling fighter jets in response to a major Russian attack on Ukraine, which hit large swathes of the country, killed at least nine people, including children, and left dozens more injured or trapped under rubble.

Thursday’s incident is not the first time Poland has reported a “Russian-made” missile landing on its soil – but this one reached unusually far. In November 2022, one struck and killed two people but that incident was only 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border.

The attacks come days after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the United States to again plead for more air defenses, as Russia fires more ballistic missiles into Ukraine and intensifies its air assaults on the country’s cities. As a result, more Ukrainian civilians have been killed this month than in any since April 2022.

At the same time, Kyiv is emphasizing its ability to hit deep inside Russia, attacking Wildberries facilities, often described as “Russia’s Amazon,” across the border.

Deadly strikes in Ukraine

This wave of attacks killed at least eight people across the country, according to its foreign minister Andrii Sybiha, including six members of a single family.

In the village of Radushne, near Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, Olena and Artem Voronov and four children in their family were killed after a ballistic missile blew a family home “into smithereens,” as Zelensky described it. Authorities are still looking for the four other children believed to be in the house when the missile truck, but have warned it is unlikely anyone survived.

Graphic video from Radushne showed bodies strewn amid the rubble of a shattered building, with fires still burning.

Two unseen women could be heard speaking. “We’ve pulled one child out. There are still some lying over there,” one said. “There are children here. There are many children,” the other said.

According to preliminary reports, Russia used a North Korean ballistic missile “for the first time in a long while” near Radushne, Zelensky said.

In Lviv, emergency workers rescued an injured 10-year-old boy, who was carried away on a stretcher, as they raced to save people trapped under rubble after an attack on a residential building.

At least 54 people across the country were wounded, Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday.

The attack, which used more than 70 missiles and 280 drones, also damaged or destroyed dozens of homes, businesses and infrastructure facilities, Zelensky said on Thursday.

Ukraine intercepted more than 260 drones, according to Zelensky, in what he said was a commendable feat given a “critical shortage of air defense missiles from our partners.”

Missile crater in Poland

European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, strongly condemned Russia’s Thursday attack on Ukraine and the lone missile landing in Poland, before doubling down on their support for Kyiv.

NATO chief Mark Rutte echoed that sentiment, and added that the alliance’s commitment to Ukraine is “unwavering.”

The missile crashed in an undeveloped area near the village of Tarnawa-Kolonia in Lublin province, Poland’s army said. Polish police said residents reported hearing a powerful blast.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said it carried out a “massive strike using long-range precision weapons from land, air, and sea” as well as attack drones on military sites across Ukraine, in a statement posted to Telegram Thursday. Moscow has not yet commented on the missile landing in Poland.

On his way home on Wednesday, Zelensky stopped in the Polish city of Lublin – not far from the site of the next day’s crash – to meet with Tusk. The two leaders discussed “the outcomes of (Zelensky’s) visit to the United States and the security of Poland, Ukraine, and all of Europe,” according to a post to X by Tusk.

Poland has routinely scrambled jets in response to Russian attacks on western Ukraine, though they have rarely entered its territory. NATO fighter jets shot down multiple Russian drones that violated Polish airspace last September, denouncing Moscow for “absolutely dangerous behavior.”

Analysis: What is Putin’s aim?

By Nick Paton Walsh

The confusion is the point.

Does this Russian incursion into NATO territory amount to a purposeful test of NATO’s responses? Or an error that provides a useful opportunity, all the same, to observe whether the West escalates back or not?

There are three coincidences here that arouse suspicion about whether the Poland incident was an accident. First, that the missile landed – after being pursued and observed by Polish forces for several minutes at least – right into an empty field, a full 90 kilometres inside Poland, threatening no-one. Second, that this field happens to be in the area where President Zelensky met Polish PM Donald Tusk hours earlier. And finally, that it comes after weeks of western concerns Moscow might seek to escalate the war.

In truth, there is no obvious answer to whether this is a deliberate test, or just one of many missiles fired by Russia that night which went off course, or got caught in jamming inside Ukraine, or along the Polish border. And that is Russia’s intention, if indeed this was intentional: to see how NATO responds, how far Moscow can push the largest military alliance in history, and perhaps make the next incursion by a Russian missile less of a major event – to get Poland accustomed to the idea.

This uncertainty will inform NATO’s response. You can’t respond forcefully if you aren’t sure what’s just happened. But all the same, a Russian missile just landed inside NATO, and that is unquestionably a big deal.

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This story has been updated with additional developments. CNN’s Clare Sebastian, Jonny Hallam, Zachary Cohen, Jennifer Hansler and Michael Rios contributed to this report.