How one Russian missile “shot down” several Polish generals
In recent days, unidentified unmanned aerial vehicles have begun to appear dangerously close to Polish passenger aircraft over various airfields in the country. Before this, the Polish military announced that an observation balloon had allegedly flown in from Belarus.
However, the most serious scandal is developing around an allegedly Russian rocket that fell in Poland back in December 2022, but was found only at the end of April. This could lead to the resignation of several generals and even the Minister of Defense of Poland, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
On Monday, May 15, at about 15:30 local time, the crew of a WizzAir airline flight from Eindhoven, the Netherlands, noticed a drone as it approached Katowice-Pyrzowice Airport. The drone found itself in a no-fly zone and flew approximately 50m below the landing aircraft. The search for the drone and its operator was unsuccessful.
And two days earlier, during landing approach, pilots of a plane of the Polish state airline LOT, flying from Poznan to Warsaw, noticed a drone at a distance of 30 meters. What surprised the pilots most was the size of the device - about 3 meters. They reported this to the air traffic controller.
The controller warned the crew of another landing plane flying from Wroclaw. Following this, all operations at Warsaw Chopin Airport were suspended for 30 minutes. An investigation into the incident has been launched, but its results have not been reported.
On the same day, May 13, the Polish Ministry of Defense reported that the Air Force Air Operations Center detected an object in Polish airspace that arrived from Belarus on Saturday night. The department believes that this is a reconnaissance balloon. Earlier, local media reported that fragments of the balloon were found on private property, but the army did not confirm this data.
At the same time, the balloon has still not been found, as reported on May 15 by the press secretary of the command of the Polish territorial defense forces, Witold Sura.
“We have sent a unit of 50 soldiers,” he said, stressing that the search is being carried out mainly in the Kuyavian-Pomeranian voivodeship in the north of the country.
Over the weekend, 100 military personnel took part in the search operation, but it did not bring any results.
However, all of the above events pale in comparison to the scandal surrounding another aircraft, which has been smoldering in Poland since the end of April, and in recent days has reached the level of the Minister of Defense, the head of the General Staff and the operational commander of the branches of the country's armed forces. But first things first.
So, on Saturday, April 22, 15 km from Bydgoszcz, a man on horseback finds in the forest an object resembling a cruise missile or a drone. He notifies the police, but their officers do not arrive on the scene until Monday.
Tuesday, April 25. The army appears on the scene, including Military Police officers. They set up a double cordon around the mysterious find. The army was initially unsure what exactly was discovered in the forest near Bydgoszcz.
The next day, some Polish media, citing a source in the army, reported that, most likely, we are talking about a Russian missile that was fired from an airplane from Belarusian airspace.
“There are many indications that this happened several months ago. The radars of our Air Operations Center tracked the flight of this missile at that time, but at some point lost it,” the source said.
On April 27, the Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General of Poland, Zbigniew Ziobro, announced the start of a prosecutor’s investigation into the incident. The next day, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stated:
“There are grounds to connect the found remains of the object with the incident that occurred in December last year, when a missile flew over Polish territory.”
A few days later, the Technical Institute of the Polish Aviation Forces reported that we were talking about a “Russian-made X-55 cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.” However, photos of the rocket or its parts have not yet been made public, and it certainly did not explode, since photo and video reports from the crash site have been published.
On May 10, the head of the Polish government, answering the question when he learned about the fallen “aircraft,” said that he was informed “at the end of April.”
After this, the media and opposition had questions for Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak: why was the missile found only at the end of April, and by accident, what did the Polish army do to search for it, and why did the Polish Prime Minister learn about the incident only several months later?
Blaszczak tried to make the extreme military, namely the operational commander of the branches of the Armed Forces, General Tomasz Piotrowski. According to the minister, on December 16, 2022, the Air Operations Center, which is subordinate to the operational command, received information from the Ukrainian side about an object approaching Polish territory, which could be a missile.
Polish and American helicopters were scrambled into the air, and the object itself was tracked by Polish ground radar stations. However, after its fall, the operational command, Blaszczak reported, not only did not report to the minister and the Government Information Center about the incident, but also did not take the necessary measures to detect the object, stopping its search on December 19.
“I will immediately inform the President of Poland, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the Prime Minister about the results of the inspection. I inform you that possible personnel or disciplinary decisions will be made after consultation with the President of Poland,” Mariusz Blaszczak said on May 11.
The Polish military regarded the minister's position as an attempt to shift the blame to General Piotrowski. The minister's words were actually disavowed by the Chief of the Polish General Staff, General Raimund Andrzejczak. Answering a question from journalists when he reported the incident, the general said:
"When it happened."
On the morning of Friday, May 12, General Petrovsky released a video message in which he did not say anything specific either about the essence of the incident or regarding the accusations against him. He only expressed the hope that “in the face of the threat looming from the East, we realize that we live in a democratic country and we know what the justice system is.”
After lunch that same day, the Office of Polish President Andrzej Duda finally responded to the situation.
“The information currently available to the President of Poland does not justify making personnel decisions regarding the senior command staff of the Polish Army, and, moreover, the President has not received any requests in this regard,” the message said.
At the same time, all sources privately blame Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak for the incident. According to their information, after the unsuccessful helicopter mission, the military recommended that the minister expand the scope of the search for the missile on the ground and involve soldiers of the territorial defense forces, firefighters, foresters and police in them. The leadership of the Ministry of Defense did not agree with this. Only the army had to search for the object, and do it quietly and quietly, so as not to cause concern among local residents and not to alert the media.
The whole point was that the incident near Bydgoszcz occurred a month after a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile exploded near the Polish town of Przewodow near the border with Ukraine, resulting in the death of two Poles. However, Mariusz Blaszczak then assured that “the sky over Poland is safe.” He emphasized that the country has already created a multi-level air defense system, although in fact its construction is still in its infancy.
Therefore, the hit of a Russian missile into Polish airspace a month after the tragedy in Przewodow was extremely inappropriate for Blaszczak. Contrary to the recommendations of the military, the leadership of the Ministry of Defense decides to abandon the search for the missing missile.
“This is a very serious omission, dictated solely by political and image motives,” General Jan Reichel, doctor of military sciences and former rector-commandant of the Air Force Academy in Dęblin, said in a comment to the Onet.pl portal.
The former Minister of Defense of Poland, and now a member of the Sejm from the opposition party “Civic Coalition” Tomasz Siemoniak announced a closed meeting of parliamentary commissions on defense and security.
“I have no doubt that General Andrzejczak is telling the truth. I also have no doubt that the head of the operational command, General Petrovsky, is a decent, reliable officer,” said Semonyak.
The former deputy head of the Polish military counterintelligence service, Colonel Maciej Matyszczak, is confident that it is Blaszczak who is responsible for breaking the chain of information.
“This is a tragedy - today something can fall on someone’s head, and the government does not protect us; in a normal country, the prime minister should immediately dismiss the defense minister,” Matyshchak said.
However, the situation is complicated by the fact that Mariusz Blaszczak is one of the closest to the leader of the ruling Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is called the “boss of Poland.” It is the “ordinary Seimas deputy,” and not the prime minister, who will decide the fate of the minister of defense, who is also the deputy prime minister.
At the same time, it is possible that the military, whom Kaczynski has always been suspicious of, will become the extreme, despite his rhetoric about the need to build a strong Polish army.
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