Poland announced on Wednesday morning that Russian drones penetrated its airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine, and it scrambled its aircraft and those of its NATO allies in response, the first such incident since the Russian-Ukraine war began.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk convened his ministers for an emergency meeting and said he was in “constant contact” with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

The Polish army said that radar systems tracked over 10 Russian drones. The army said in a statement that “some of the drones that penetrated our airspace were intercepted. Searches and efforts to locate their potential crash sites are continuing.”

It was reported later that one of the drones hit a residential building in the town of Wiryki in the east of the country. There were no casualties.

The Polish army called on residents of the eastern districts of Lublin, Podlasie and Mazovia, which are near the Ukrainian border, to stay at home following the drone penetration. “This is an aggressive action that constitutes a real threat to the safety of our citizens,” the Polish army added in its statement.

Following the interceptions, Warsaw’s Chopin Airport, the largest airport in the country, announced that its airspace was closed due to military operations. The Flightradar24 website showed several flights that were scheduled to land early in the morning at the port changing their route to the ports in Katowice, Wroclaw and Poznan.

In most of Ukraine, including the Volyn and Lviv regions bordering Poland, sirens were heard throughout the night warning of air strikes. Since the beginning of the war, Russia has carried out numerous air strikes on the city of Lviv in western Ukraine, which is 80 kilometers from the Polish border.

Earlier this week, Polish President Karol Nawrocki, who was sworn into office last month, warned of the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be satisfied with the invasion of Ukraine. “We do not trust Putin’s ‘good intentions,'” he said. “We believe he is ready to invade other countries.”

Poland, which has proffered extensive aid to Kyiv during the war, is home to more than one million Ukrainian refugees who have fled their country since the Russian invasion.

The escalation comes only three days after Russia’s largest air attack on Ukraine since the start of the war, in which the central government building in the capital Kyiv was hit. Yesterday, 24 elderly Ukrainians were killed in the village of Yarova in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine while standing in line for their pension money.

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)