Polish military police are combing the ground for evidence after what was reportedly a drone exploded in a field in the east of the country, damaging nearby buildings.
Police responded to reports of an explosion in a corn field in Osiny, Łuków County in the Lublin Voivodeship — a rural region between capital Warsaw and the Belarus and Ukrainian borders — at 0200 (0100 London, 2000 New York) on Monday. Responding officers discovered “burnt metal and plastic debris scattered over a radius of several dozen meters” and that the blast had been powerful enough to shatter windows in several nearby buildings.
There were no reported injuries, states Polish wires service PAP.
National network TVN24 cited security camera footage that recorded the moment of the blast and provided an image allegedly taken of the scene showing the remains of an engine and propeller in the field, surrounded by blasted corn stalks. No confirmation has yet officially been forthcoming but the engine appears superficially similar, at least, to the distinct air-cooled horizontally-opposed four cylinder aero engine from Iranian-designed Shahed drones used by Russia to bombard Ukraine nightly.
Indeed, Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita claims sources that the explosion was indeed caused by a Shahed drone, a potentially serious incursion into NATO airspace especially given Poland’s Operational Command of the Armed Forces state their radar systems detected no incursions overnight. The Warsaw-based headquarters which frequently dispatches F-16 fighter jets to intercept stray drones and missiles from the Ukraine war said in a statement today: “after conducting preliminary analyses of radar system records, no violation of Polish airspace was recorded last night from either Ukraine or Belarus.”
The Operational Command said information about the recovered remains of the propeller and engine had been “forwarded to the Air Operations Center – Air Component Command” for investigation and that military police and “Air and Ground Search and Rescue Teams” were on the scene looking for evidence.
Speaking earlier this morning, Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said the investigation was considering “every scenario” and said the “most likely” event was a drone crash. At that time he said it wasn’t certain it was military, and could even have been “a smuggling drone” or an “act of sabotage”. Later, local prosecutors said their office had “initially ruled out civilian and smuggling” drones as being a potential culprit.
Poland, which has a land border with warzone Ukraine, Russian ally and attack staging-point Belarus, and Russia’s European exclave Kaliningrad has occasionally suffered incursions from loose drones and missiles from the Ukraine war. These have ranged from Russian missiles transiting over Polish airspace to Ukrainian air-defence missiles trying to shoot down Russian targets mis-firing and heading the wrong way. Tragically in some cases, Polish civilians on the ground have been killed.
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