"19 Airspace Violations Overnight, Four Drones Shot Down"
On the morning of September 10 (local time), the Polish government announced that there had been a total of 19 airspace violations and that four drones appeared to have been shot down.
According to Reuters, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated after a cabinet meeting that a significant number of drones had entered Poland from the direction of Belarus. Tusk also said that Poland would request the activation of Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Article 4 of the NATO treaty allows a member state to request urgent consultations if its territorial integrity, political independence, or security is threatened.
During the cabinet meeting, Tusk said that NATO allies are highly likely to face large-scale provocations from Russia. He evaluated that the deployment of NATO air defense systems and fighter jets to shoot down the drones was "the first test passed for our military, our allies, and our procedures." Previously, Poland had announced that it had shot down Russian drones that had violated its airspace. However, the Russian charg? d'affaires in Poland claimed that Poland had not provided evidence that the downed drones had originated from Russia.
In response, Belarus, a Russian ally, claimed that it had notified Poland and Lithuania overnight that drones had deviated from their flight paths. Belarusian Chief of the General Staff Pavel Muraveiko said that during the night, Russia and Ukraine exchanged drone strikes, and some drones lost their way due to electronic warfare equipment. He added that the Belarusian air force tracked and shot down some of these drones, but did not specify whether the drones that deviated from their course belonged to Russia or Ukraine.
The Ukrainian Air Force announced that Russia had launched 415 drones overnight and that 386 of them were intercepted or disrupted. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that it had shot down 122 Ukrainian drones. Polish authorities are currently searching for the wreckage of drones that were shot down or crashed. Local media outlet TVP reported that one drone that violated Polish airspace crashed in Mnichkup in central Poland, more than 250 kilometers from the border with Ukraine. According to TVP, this drone was a Russian Geran-2 model, an upgraded version of the Iranian Shahed drone, and crashed due to fuel exhaustion.
In Biryki, eastern Poland, about 15 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, debris from a downed drone crashed into a residential building, damaging its roof.
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
