Two officials aware of the initial US assessments said it appears the missile that killed two people in eastern Poland on Wednesday came from Ukraine, even though it was Russian-made.
The official said the assessment is what President Joe Biden seemed to be referring to in his remarks earlier, when he said it was “unlikely” that the missile came from Russia.
The officials said intelligence assessments had been discussed at the emergency meeting called by Biden on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali and would also be a talking point at a meeting of NATO ambassadors in Brussels.
The joint statement after the G7 meeting was also deliberately ambiguous when it came to the incident, drawing much more attention to the dozens of strikes that took place in the hours before the missions entered Poland.
A spokesman for the US National Security Council declined to comment on reports that the Russian-made missile that landed in eastern Poland killing two people was fired by Ukrainian forces trying to intercept a Russian attack.
“We have no comment and will not confirm this report. As the president said today, we support Poland’s ongoing investigation to find out exactly what happened,” the spokesman said.
Earlier, President Biden said preliminary information suggests that the missile that landed in Poland is unlikely to have been fired from Russia after discussions with allies at the G20 summit in Indonesia.
“I don’t want to say that [it was fired from Russia] until we fully investigate,” Biden continued. “It is unlikely in the minds of the trajectory that it was fired from Russia. But we’ll see.”
Both Russian and Ukrainian forces have used Russian-made munitions during the nine-month conflict. DailyExpertNews has previously reported that Ukraine has been using Russian-made missiles as part of their air defense system. These older generation weapon systems date back to when both Russia and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union.
In a statement to DailyExpertNews on Wednesday, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not explicitly deny that the missile came from Ukraine, but emphasized Russia’s responsibility for starting the war.
“There is only one logic to follow,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. “The war has started and is being waged by Russia. Russia is attacking Ukraine en masse with cruise missiles. Russia has turned the eastern part of the European continent into an unpredictable battlefield. Intent, means of execution, risk, escalation – it all comes only from Russia.”
“And there can be no other explanation for a missile incident here. So when an aggressor country launches a deliberate, massive missile attack against a major country on the European continent with its obsolete Soviet-era weapons (Kh-class missiles), sooner or later a tragedy also occurs on the territory of other states.