“From” is doing some unfortunate heavy lifting here.
As a practical matter, air defense systems don’t care much about who the inbound belongs to, and most inbounds don’t clearly identify themselves. “From Russia” is not technically relevant.
“From” indicating direction is very relevant, however. Conscientious operators would be very cautious of engaging a track inbound from friendly airspace.
As far as the air defense system knew, those tracks were Polish, not Russian.
I think Poland needs to be prepared to defend the sovereignty of its airspace, if at all practical.
I guess I was addressing the wrong question in my prior post.
I agree with you in principle, but as @LSLGuy indicated earlier, neither NATO nor Poland are in any active state of hostility with Russia. Enhanced readiness has a cost, and no one not already engaged in the war is willing to undertake the costs and risks.
Understandable, but this is how belligerents get the advantage of surprise.
No, but they are aware that an enemy state is attacking a friendly state. Violation of their airspace by an enemy state might be considered an act of war. While Poland isn’t a belligerent, they have the right to – and should be ready to – shoot down any enemy aircraft or missile violating their sovereign territory.
A small cost, considering the stakes. Given that some people in Russia have said that Poland is next, it would be foolish not to be ready. (Admittedly, I think most of the Russians saying that Poland is next are their version of Tucker Carlson.)
I don’t think the costs of accidentally shooting down a Russian airliner would be small.
War is foggy. If you’re ready to join a fight, you are inextricably ready to commit atrocities, only excused by the fact of war. I don’t any NATO member is ready for that now.
We might be drifting toward the edge of the thread’s topic of the invasion of Ukraine, talking about Poland intercepting Ukraine-bound missiles in their airspace. I suggest a different thread for the wider situation.
Fairly early in the war there was Russian ordnance that unequivocally landed in Poland proper, but to no real damage. (Or was it Ukrainian ordnance? No skullduggery implied here; I simply now forget which it was.) Which impact was wisely shrugged off as just one of those things that occasionally happens when you have a front row seat to somebody elses’ war.
There’s a difference between 24/7/365 hair trigger readiness to fire at anything approaching our country, versus having enough forces on quick enough alert that a major hostile air raid as the opening move in a real invasion into our country will be at least partly blunted before it lands.
Unless you are the attacker, there are more rewards to patience than to haste in the twilight before hostilities that might later start, or might not. Hair trigger alert is both expensive and “crisis unstable” as they say in the foreign relations biz.
It was a Ukrainian S-300 AA missile that had gone astray. The Ukrainians initially denied it was theirs, but the evidence was pretty clear. It was definitely an S-300 missile, and while the Russians had been using those in ground attack mode they were only doing so far to the east. In the west where this happened, it would have had to have been fired from Belarus, and Russia didn’t have any S-300’s there.
There’s no practical reason why Poland can’t shoot down missiles Russia claims they didn’t launch. What are they going to do? Attack a NATO country over something they deny doing? Bang a shoe on a UN table?
This is a test of wills that will continue if we let them.
I don’t know how air defence systems work but if the Ukrainians have to reconfigure them to account for missiles coming from a new direction, and if that means the air defence will be x% less effective in future, then that Russian strike has done its job. I assume this is the sort of calculated risk that gets done in wars to eek out a small marginal gain.
Strictly she is. She’s certainly not a combatant. If the factory is operated by the military using military people and she was one of those military people then she would not be a civilian.
This is all tied in with the very slippery slope about combatants, direct support, indirect support, and the “civilian economy” in the context of modern industrial warfare where the whole economy and whole populace is supporting to various degrees their nations’ war efforts.
Once you’re shooting at somebody who’s not actively shooting at you at that moment, how close to “combatant” is close enough? Darn hard to know.
If the Kremlin said it, any resemblance to the truth is accidental. Twitter is saying the rockets Russia claims Ukraine used have a 25km range, while Belgorod is 35km from the border. Ukrainians on Twitter are saying it’s either Russian air defense rockets malfunctioning or it’s a Russian false flag. Who the fuck knows? It’s not like Ukraine doesn’t have armament with sufficient range to hit Belgorod. And it’s also not like Russia hasn’t shelled its own civilians for propaganda purposes in the past (IIRC there was a particularly heinous example of that used as a cassus belli for the 2nd Chechen war.) Ukrainians haven’t generally attacked purely civilian targets, I think because they see it as a waste of ammunition, but it could still have been their weapons mistargeted due to bad intelligence, or simply missing what they were shooting at.
Russia expecting international sympathy for a few civilian casualties the day after they launched 160 missiles and drones at mostly civilian targets in Ukraine is a bit ridiculous, regardless.
The Russians are butt hurt about killing civilians. Really? REALLY?
BBC
An urgent meeting of the UN Security Council in New York was held on Saturday at Russia’s request - with Russia saying it had asked the Czech representative to attend. The BBC is not able to verify the Russian claims that Czech ammunition was used.
Granted. The issue IMO is that Russia doesn’t have good logistics out to the front line units. So they don’t have a week or three’s cruise missiles and drones sitting around in a warehouse near enough the front immediately available to conduct the reprisal raid that @aceplace57 suggested they had done.
My belief is that big raid was pretty well pre-planned, not a spur-of-the-moment reprisal decision.
Someone on Reddit created this useful graphic showing the territorial changes in 2023. Yellow shows Ukrainian gains, blue is Russian. And it shows… pretty much a stalemate as we all know.
