WARSAW/SKNYLIV, Ukraine: Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday Russia had planned acts of "air terror” against airlines worldwide, accusing Moscow of staging sabotage and diversion on Polish soil and beyond. He made the declaration while hosting neighboring Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for talks in Warsaw, just days before US president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
EU and NATO member Poland has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies since Russia launched a war against Kyiv in February 2022. "Poland plays a key role in Europe in countering the acts of sabotage and diversion that Russia is organizing, and not just on Polish territory,” Tusk told reporters. "Russia had planned acts of air terror, and not only against Poland, but against airlines all over the world,” he added.
In November, Lithuania carried out arrests as part of a criminal probe into incendiary devices sent on Western-bound planes. According to Polish and Lithuanian media, the devices, including electric massagers implanted with a flammable substance, were sent from Lithuania to Britain in July and could be behind a lorry fire outside Warsaw. The Lithuanian president’s chief security adviser blamed Moscow for the incidents. UK anti-terrorism police in October said they were investigating how a parcel burst into flames at a depot earlier this year, after a similar case in Germany blamed on Russia.
Tusk also pledged that Poland, which currently holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, will speed up Ukraine’s process to join the bloc. "The Polish presidency will break the impasse that has been evident in recent months,” Tusk said. Zelensky told reporters that "the sooner Ukraine is in the EU, the sooner Ukraine becomes a member of NATO... the sooner the whole of Europe will get the geopolitical certainty it needs”.
Polish President Andrzej Duda, who also met with Zelensky on Wednesday, reiterated that Ukraine must be present at the table during any eventual peace talks. "There can be no talks regarding Ukraine, the war’s end, Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty, without Ukraine’s participation,” Duda told reporters.
Russia strikes Ukraine facilities
Russia launched a wave of missiles and drones at Ukrainian energy facilities at dawn on Wednesday, intensifying a months-long bombing campaign at a precarious moment of the war for Ukraine. The Russian barrage came just one day after Kyiv said it had carried out its largest aerial attack of the war on Russian army factories and energy hubs hundreds of kilometers from the front line.
The Ukrainian air force said Russia had launched 43 cruise and ballistic missiles as well as 74 attack drones in the barrage that targeted sites mainly in western Ukraine. Oleksandra Komuna, an elderly resident of the western Ukrainian village of Sknyliv, was at home during the attack when lamps and plaster began falling. "All the doors and windows were blown out, everything was blown out. The car was damaged, and the roof was damaged. There were cracks everywhere. It’s such a disaster,” she told AFP.
Zelensky was quick to condemn the strikes and called for more robust security assistance from allies abroad. "Another massive Russian attack. It is the middle of winter, and the target for the Russians remains the same: our energy sector,” he wrote on social media. The Russian defense ministry confirmed in a daily briefing that its forces had carried out "high precision” strikes on energy facilities that "support the Ukrainian military-industrial complex”.
It also repeated the claim that all the designated targets had been struck. The Ukrainian air force said however that it had shot down 30 of the missiles and 47 drones, while Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said the Russian attack had "failed”. Poland had earlier scrambled fighter jets to secure its airspace, it announced on social media, adding that there had been no violations of its airspace over its three-hour mission.
The governor of Ukraine’s western Ivano-Frankivsk region said that critical infrastructure facilities had been targeted in the attack, without elaborating. In the Lviv region, which borders EU and NATO member Poland, authorities said two critical infrastructure facilities had been hit in the Drogobych and Stryi districts. "There were no casualties, but there was damage,” governor Maksym Kozytsky wrote on social media. National grid operator Ukrenergo urged Ukrainians to limit their electricity use throughout the day after lifting emergency blackouts in seven regions.
The mayor of the southern city of Kherson meanwhile said that "part of our community is without electricity” as a result of the overnight barrage, without giving figures of those without power. Kyiv had earlier issued air raid alerts across Ukraine and AFP journalists heard sirens ringing out over the capital early Wednesday. – AFP