Poland finds debris of drone near Belarus border

Audio By Carbonatix

WARSAW (Reuters) – Polish border guards found drone debris in a village near the border with Belarus, a prosecutor said on Monday, the latest in a series of similar incidents in the NATO member country that neighbours Ukraine.

Poland has been on high alert for objects entering its airspace since a stray Ukrainian missile struck a southern Polish village in 2022, killing two people, a few months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“This drone crashed at the border crossing, approximately 300 meters from the border crossing, in the village of Polatycze. The drone is unarmed, and there are Cyrillic inscriptions on it,” said Agnieszka Kepka from the prosecutor’s office in the eastern city of Lublin.

Military police are questioning witnesses and were checking surveillance data to determine the trajectory of the drone, she said in a televised press conference.

No one was injured in the incident, police said.

On Saturday, an object likely to be a smuggling drone rather than a weapon fell in eastern Poland, a defence ministry spokesperson said.

In August, a drone crashed into a cornfield in eastern Poland, scorching crops and shattering windows in nearby homes. A prosecutor investigating the incident said at the time it appeared to have entered Poland from the direction of Belarus, an ally of Russia.

Military drones have also crashed in Romania and the Baltic states.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Ros Russell)