Poland confirms Russian cruise missile crashed on its territory

DPAUpdated Fri, July 31, 2026 at 9:18 AM UTC1 min readAdd Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.Key takeawaysPowered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.

• Poland confirms that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile crashed near its border with Ukraine, potentially carrying nuclear warheads.
• The missile exploded upon impact in an uninhabited area near the village of Tarnawa Kolonia, with no injuries reported.
• Debris recovered from the impact crater conclusively shows that the missile was manufactured in the Moscow region in the second quarter of 2026.

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Poland has confirmed that a projectile that crashed near its border with Ukraine was a Russian cruise missile.

"I have spoken to the head of operations, General Ireneusz Nowak, and we can confirm with full certainty that this is a Russian Kh-101 missile," Deputy Defence Minister Cezary Tomczyk told radio station Rmf.fm on Thursday evening.

He said the missile was potentially very dangerous and could also carry nuclear warheads.

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Tomczyk said it had exploded upon impact.

The Polish military had said on Thursday morning that an unidentified flying object entered NATO airspace and crashed in Polish territory during heavy Russian airstrikes on neighbouring Ukraine overnight.

The object came down in an uninhabited area near the village of Tarnawa Kolonia, some 90 kilometres south of Lublin, where an alarm sounded early in the morning.

According to the military, an F-16 fighter jet was scrambled to identify it, but the projectile subsequently disappeared from radar. The crew of a helicopter later identified the crash site.

Police officers later found a crater 10 metres in diameter near Tarnawa Kolonia. No one was injured in the incident.

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The government in Warsaw initially only said that the object was suspected to be a Russian missile and the investigation was ongoing.

A spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Lublin said later on Friday that a large amount of debris had been recovered from the impact crater, including the propulsion system and electrical components.

The recovered materials allowed for the "clear conclusion" that the Kh-101 cruise missile had been manufactured in the second quarter of 2026 at a defence industry facility in the Moscow region, he said.