Ukraine said it faced fierce fighting in the east from Russian troops that withdrew from Kherson in the south, while NATO and Poland concluded a missile that crashed in Poland was probably a stray fired by Ukraine’s air defences.
The government in Kyiv was working to restore power across the country on Wednesday after intense Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure earlier in the week, officials said.
NATO ambassadors held emergency talks on Wednesday to respond to Tuesday’s blast that killed two people at a grain facility in Poland near the Ukrainian border, the war’s first deadly extension into the territory of the Western alliance, Reuters reported.
“From the information that we and our allies have, it was an S-300 rocket made in the Soviet Union, an old rocket and there is no evidence that it was launched by the Russian side,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said. “It is highly probable that it was fired by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defence.”
Nevertheless, NATO’s chief said that Russia, not Ukraine, was still to blame for starting the war with its February invasion and launching scores of missiles on Tuesday that triggered Ukrainian defences.
“This is not Ukraine’s fault. Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels.
Stoltenberg also said it was likely to have been a Ukrainian air defence missile. Earlier, U.S. President Joe Biden had said the trajectories suggested the missile was unlikely to have been unleashed from Russia. Russia denied responsibility.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy demurred, saying “I have no doubt that it was not our missile”, Ukrainian media reported on Wednesday. He said he based his conclusion on reports from Ukraine’s military which he “cannot but trust”.
He gave no evidence for his position and, in a nightly video address, urged that Ukraine be included in the investigation of the explosion site in Poland in order to determine the facts.
Asked about the discrepancy in accounts from Ukraine, Poland and NATO, a State Department spokesperson in Washington said, “We are aware of President Zelenskiy’s comments … but we do not have any information that would contradict Poland’s preliminary findings.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the “mayhem” around accusations of Russian involvement in the missile were “part of a systematic anti-Russian campaign by the West.”
The missile incident occurred while Russia was firing scores of missiles at cities across Ukraine, targeting its energy grid and worsening power blackouts for millions, in what Ukraine says was the most intense volley of such strikes of the nine-month-long war.