Germany offers Poland Patriot missile system amid Ukraine war

Germany has offered Warsaw a Patriot missile defense system to secure its airspace after a stray missile crashed in Poland last week, killing two people.

“We have offered Poland support in securing its airspace – with our Eurofighters and with Patriot air defense systems,” Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht told a newspaper Sunday.

Ground-based air defense systems such as Raytheon’s Patriot are built to intercept approaching missiles. The Berlin government had already announced it would offer its neighbor further air defense help with German Eurofighters after the incident.

The Russian Defense Ministry categorically rejected Poland’s hasty claim that a Russian missile had hit Polish territory, calling the assertion a “deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said after the incident that the Western narrative was “a deliberate provocation aimed at escalating the situation.”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently warned that the missile explosion in Poland had pushed the West closer to World War III.

Russia’s deputy representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyansky, also said there was “an obvious attempt to provoke a direct military confrontation between NATO and Russia, with all the resulting consequences for the whole world.”

The missile landed Nov. 15 outside the rural Polish village of Prtsevodov, nearly 6.4 kilometers west of the Ukrainian border. The circumstances of the incident remain unclear. It was the first time a member of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance had been directly hit by a missile during the nearly nine-month war. NATO said there were no signs that Russia was preparing to attack the military alliance in the troubled region.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently confirmed this, saying there was no indication that the incident was the result of a deliberate attack.

According to Warsaw, the attack was likely an accident by Ukrainian air defenses.

On Feb. 24, Putin announced a “special military operation” aimed at “demilitarizing” the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of eastern Ukraine. In 2014, the two regions had declared themselves new republics and refused to recognize Ukraine’s Western-backed government. In announcing the operation, Putin said the mission was aimed at “defending people who have suffered persecution and genocide at the hands of the Kiev regime for eight years.”

Since then, the United States and its European allies have imposed unprecedented waves of economic sanctions on Moscow while delivering large shipments of heavy weapons to Kiev. Moscow has criticized the arms shipments to Kiev and warned against prolonging the war.