If it was a Russian missile that struck a Polish village on Tuesday, killing two people, it would be the first time a Russian weapon has ever come down on Nato territory.
The Soviet Union and the US managed to get through the whole cold war without making such a mistake, because Washington and Moscow were well aware of the risks of going to war by accident or miscalculation.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a far less predictable nuclear power than the Soviet Union, raising the danger level, as Joe Biden has pointed out, to the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.
Putin’s intervention in Syria led to a Russian warplane being shot down by a Turkish fighter jet over the Turkish-Syrian border in November 2015, but that incident was contained. Similarly, Tuesday’s missile incident is unlikely to lead to a direct Nato-Russian confrontation.
The Polish government has said it is still investigating whose missiles fell on its territory, and the office of President Andrzej Duda has said it is considering invoking article 4 of Nato’s founding treaty, which allows any member to call for urgent consultations of the North Atlantic council “whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened”. Duda spoke to Biden; the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg; and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Tuesday night.
Warsaw did not mention article 5 of the treaty, which states that an armed attack on one member is an attack on all, and which would be the most likely mechanism of escalation to a war between Nato and Russia.
Article 5 cannot be invoked by just one member state, the former US ambassador to Nato, Ivo Daalder, said, adding it “requires Nato consensus”. The only time it was invoked by the Nato allies was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and led to the allies providing aerial radar patrols over the US and stepping up naval patrols in the Mediterranean.
Even if it was concluded that the missiles that crossed the Polish border were indeed Russian, and not Ukrainian anti-missile interceptors, it would fall short of an “armed attack” envisaged in article 5, argued William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control for International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“‘Deliberate armed attack’ is a real thing,” Alberque said. “Two misfired cruise or ballistic missiles ain’t it.”
Up to now, the broad Nato consensus has been that Russian escalation would lead to stepped-up arms supplies to Ukraine, and that – rather than any form of direct Nato involvement – would serve as a deterrent to Russian recklessness.
That is the most likely response this time, and there will be a debate within Nato on whether it warrants a step up in the sort of military assistance being provided. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, argued it warranted the provision of F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
The Polish border incident has also restored calls for a no-fly zone over western Ukraine enforced by Nato air defences, in particular from Baltic state officials. Advocates of such a move argued that the risks of such a step triggering an all-out war are far lower now than at the start of the full-scale invasion, as Russian forces are currently confined to the far east and south of the country. However, there would be considerable resistance to any such expansion of Nato’s role from the US and other Nato allies.
Even though this incident is likely to be contained, it does not mean that risks of a Nato-Russian clash through miscalculation are not real. Kyiv is anxious to bind Nato as closely as possible to the country’s struggle to restore its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that the missiles were a “a strike against our collective security” and a “very serious escalation”.
Meanwhile, as the Russian military debacle in Ukraine worsens with the loss of Kherson and surrounding territory, Putin is becoming more desperate and the ultra-hawks who dominate television discourse in Russia are baying for a confrontation to rationalise the humiliation of losing a war to Ukraine.
While the defence ministry claimed not to have anything to do with the missiles, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the RT propaganda channel, gloated over the implications of a Russian strike.
“If this isn’t a deliberate provocation, there’s one piece of good news here,” Simonyan said on Twitter. “A Nato country is so shitily defended that anyone can accidentally hit it with anything and all of Nato won’t even know who hit it, with what and why.”
