Poland’s army said a Russian aircraft briefly violated the airspace over the NATO country’s territorial waters Tuesday in the latest incident over the strategically located Baltic Sea.
Poland — a staunch ally of war-torn Ukraine — shares a border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad and has called for ramped-up protection of the Baltic Sea from acts of sabotage.
“A Su-24MR aircraft of the armed forces of the Russian Federation violated the airspace over the territorial waters of Poland,” the country’s Operational Command said in a statement on X.
The army said the aircraft flying from Kaliningrad was in Polish airspace for one minute 12 seconds and flew up to 6.5 kilometres (four miles) into its territory.
“The Polish airspace control services were in contact with the Russian side, which confirmed the violation of Polish airspace,” the statement added.
Poland said that the Russian army blamed the breach on a “failure of the Su-24MR aircraft’s navigation system”.
The incident came a day after Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a record-high investment spending plan focused on security and spoke of the need to “protect the Baltic Sea from acts of diversion and sabotage”.
In recent months, several undersea telecom and power cables have been severed in Baltic Sea waters.
“The Baltic Sea has almost become an internal sea of NATO countries, of the Western world,” Tusk said on Monday.
In 2023, Poland said a Russian missile passed through its airspace via its border with Ukraine as Moscow pummelled Ukraine with a wave of drone and missile strikes.
In November 2022, a Ukrainian air defence missile fell in the Polish village of Przewodow near the border, killing two civilians.
There was initial doubt about whether the missile was Russian, raising concern that NATO could become directly involved in the war.
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