Makes you wonder, doesn't it...?
Details are still hard to come by, but from what the major Polish newsmedia (onet, GW, rp.pl etc.) have been able to piece together, the following appears likely:
- The object found in the forest near the city of Bydgoszcz was a Russian Kh-55 missile, or its improved variant, the Kh-555. Both are old designs which have in recent months been used by RuAF to saturate Ukrainian air defenses prior to carrying out strikes with more modern missiles.
- The missile is said to have contained a dummy warhead (that usually means a block of concrete shaped like a real warhead).
- The missile is quite likely to have been launched on Dec 16 as part of one of Russia's massive missile strikes on UA infrastructure. It apparently did show up on NATO radar and resulted in F-35s being scrambled in Poland. There's no word on what kind of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering may have ensued. In the event, the wreckage seems to have spent four months just sitting there before being accidentally discovered by a local resident.
- It is also unknown whether the missile veered off course or was deliberately sent on its trajectory. Cruise missiles typically self-destruct if they go off course, but since this one wasn't carrying a real warhead it would have been unable to self-destruct, and would have continued on until it ran out of fuel or crashed into something (as indeed happened).
?????
Alert fatigue is real. This is a textbook act of deception used by Russian aviation assets for decades
