Belarus has protested to Ukraine’s ambassador after saying it had downed a Ukrainian S-300 air defense missile in a field.
The military commissar of Belarus’s southwestern region of Brest, Oleg Konovalov, played Thursday’s incident down in a video posted on social media by the Belarusian state-run news agency BelTA, saying locals had “absolutely nothing to worry about.”
“Unfortunately, these things happen,” he said.
Konovalov reportedly compared the incident to one in November, when a S-300 believed to have strayed after being fired by Ukrainian air defenses landed in the territory of NATO-member Poland, triggering fears of an escalation that were rapidly defused.
The Ukrainian Ambassador Igor Kizim was summoned to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry in Minsk to receive a formal protest.
“We demanded that Ukraine conduct a thorough investigation into all the circumstances of this missile launch, hold those responsible to account and take comprehensive measures to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future, as they can lead to catastrophic consequences for everyone,” Anatoly Glaz, a spokesman for the Belarusian MFA, was cited as saying by BelTA.
BelTA notes that answering a clarifying question whether the Ukrainian side admitted the incident, the foreign ministry spokesman said: “This [information] will remain behind the walls of the place where the note was handed.”
Anatoly Glaz reportedly also answered whether any of the Ukrainian diplomats were declared persona non grata. “No, this matter has not been discussed today,” he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports that a Ukrainian military spokesman in effect acknowledged the missile was a Ukrainian stray, saying the incident was “nothing strange, a result of air defense” and something that “has happened more than once”.
