Nineteen drones violated Polish airspace last night, some of which came directly from Belarus. Minsk claims that “the drones’ navigation systems were jammed.”
Polish and allied assets tracked a dozen or so objects by radar, and for those that could pose a threat the Operational Commander of the Armed Forces (RSZ) decided to neutralize them. Some of the drones that entered our airspace were shot down. Searches are underway to locate possible crash sites of these objects, the Operational Command of the Armed Forces reported at around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday.
The operation lasted from 10:00 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. “The last of the drones was destroyed at 6:45 a.m.,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk told the Sejm. He said that for the first time the unmanned aircraft came directly from Belarus.
Belarus: The drones lost their way
As reported on the BBC website by Sarah Reinford, Belarusian Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Muraveyka said in a recording posted on Telegram that the drones entered Polish airspace “by accident, after their navigation systems were jammed.”
“The drones lost their way, and Belarus itself shot down several of them over its own territory,” Muraveyka was reported to have said.
Russian disinformation: No evidence shown
KP.ru, the portal of the mass-circulation pro-Kremlin daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, maintains that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, when informing about the airspace violation, “did not provide any evidence or details,” and that the Polish Armed Forces “provided no proof of the information’s veracity.”
The state propaganda agency RIA Novosti likewise claims that the head of the Polish government “did not provide evidence” that Russian drones were shot down.
One of the so-called war bloggers, Aleksandr Kots, expands on this theme on his Telegram channel, claiming that “no one has been shown the remains” of the drones and that “it is not difficult” to pass off as evidence the wreckage of Russian craft brought from Ukraine.
Analyst Maria Avdeeva of the U.S. think tank the Foreign Policy Research Institute reported that Russian war bloggers are circulating a fake map and claiming that the drone attack on Poland was tracked in real time and that the target was the airport in Rzeszów.