The incident with a Russian fighter jet, which had approached a Polish patrol plane over the Black Sea, had an aftermath on Wednesday: Poland's Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador in Warsaw. The diplomat was presented with a note of protest against the "provocative and aggressive behavior of the Russian side," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Twitter.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, based in Warsaw.

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On Friday, according to the Polish Border Guard, the Russian Su-35 fighter had approached the Polish Let L-410 aircraft, which was on a patrol flight for the EU border protection agency Frontex. According to Warsaw, the Su-35 carried out "aggressive and dangerous maneuvers". She approached the Polish plane three times to within about five meters and also flew past in front of him. The crew had temporarily lost control of the turboprop aircraft, which had sunk in altitude, due to the turbulence triggered, it said. The incident occurred in international airspace within the area of operation designated by Romania.

The Frontex authority, which regularly uses aircraft from EU countries, has since suspended the patrol flights of the Poles until further notice. NATO increased surveillance of the airspace. A similar incident over the Black Sea last occurred in mid-March. At that time, a Russian fighter jet flew a maneuver against an American MQ-9 Reaper drone. A video apparently made by the drone showed how the propeller of the aircraft was damaged. A little later, according to Washington, the drone was launched into the sea for a controlled crash.

In Poland, meanwhile, the crash of a presumably Russian missile on December 16 near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz continues. It was not until the end of April that the cruise missile was accidentally found and secured by a rider in the forest. The preliminary version of the investigators involved, as the Polish private broadcaster RMF FM reported on Wednesday, is that it was a Russian Ch-55 cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Since Poland's air force did not have this weapon, it must have been a Russian missile; however, there had been no explosion in the forest. The main concern in the Polish media is why, on the one hand, the rocket was observed in flight, as they say, but then disappeared from the radar screens and was not searched for "until success".

The station's informants spoke of "very difficult weather conditions" in December as the reason. "It looks like the Polish army either took the incident lightly or tried to cover it up," the channel concluded. The incident of the missile, allegedly fired from an aircraft over Belarus, is seen in the context of intense attacks by the Russian Air Force on Ukraine at that time. Earlier, on November 15, an apparently Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile hit Przewodów in southeastern Poland, killing two civilians.