Russia’s overnight missile assault on Ukraine killed at least 13 people early Thursday, with strikes reaching as far west as Lviv, near the Polish border. The attack also triggered a familiar response next door. Poland scrambled fighter jets, and police are now investigating a crater they found in a field in the country’s east.
The strike killed one person in Kyiv and injured two others; the strikes killed six more in the Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions, including two children. In Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, a strike Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s defense council head, called a direct hit from a Russian Iskander-M ballistic missile killed six people, including two girls aged five and 12, and injured eight more.
Zelensky had warned hours earlier that a massive strike was likely, pressing allies, particularly the US, to make good on air defense pledges. He’d just left a White House meeting where he said Trump agreed to license Patriot missile transfers to Ukraine.
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Poland’s armed forces said fighter jets and an early-warning aircraft began operating in its airspace as Russian long-range strikes got underway, adding that “ground-based air defence systems and radar reconnaissance systems have reached a state of readiness.” Sirens sounded overnight in Lublin, in Poland’s east.
Police say they got a report of a loud bang in Biłgoraj county, between the villages of Tarnawa Kolonia and Biskupice, and found a crater and debris from what they’re calling an unidentified object in a field. Police have secured the site. Officials haven’t said what caused it or where it came from.
Radar reportedly tracked roughly a dozen Russian missiles over western Ukraine during the attack, with one passing within 5 kilometers of the Polish border before turning back. Radar detected a separate object entering Polish airspace at 03:40, and an F-16 scrambled to intercept it but lost sight of the object before visual identification. A Mi-24 helicopter crew later found what appears to be the same impact site near Tarnawa Kolonia.
The military is reportedly adhering to standard procedure, declining to formally identify the object as a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile until debris analysis is complete, even though that’s widely assumed to be the case.
This isn’t the first close call on Poland’s eastern edge. Just last September, Polish and allied jets shot down Russian drones that breached its airspace, and Warsaw invoked NATO’s Article 4 for consultations.
Read: Poland Downs Drones, Invokes NATO Article 4
Romania has logged more than a dozen confirmed breaches of its own since, including a Russian drone strike that wounded two people in Galați in May.
Read: Romania Confirms Russian Drone Struck Galați High-Rise, Wounding Two On NATO Soil
Further back, Poland’s General Staff said in December 2023 that a Russian missile crossed into its airspace for less than three minutes before leaving. Warsaw summoned Russia’s chargé d’affaires; its deputy foreign minister warned at the time that “the repeating of such attempts will be met with a stronger reaction.” The starkest precedent remains November 2022, when a stray missile killed two people in the border village of Przewodów; investigators later traced it to Ukrainian air defense rather than a Russian strike.
