(To Giuseppe Paccione) The arrival of two missiles that hit the village Przewodow, near the Ukrainian border, has caused strong fears that it would end up in the abyss of an escalation, which would have led to the direct involvement of NATO on the Russian-Ukrainian war arena. The dynamics of the launch of the missile pair is not entirely clear whether it was launched from Russia or Ukraine. On this point both the Polish president and the secretary general of the Atlantic Alliance have asserted the absence of evidence of a deliberate attack to Polish territory.
La White House expressed concern that the Kremlin had launched the missiles towards Poland, while the Moscow government immediately rejected the accusations that it had attacked Polish soil, asserting that the pair of missiles came from a defense system S-300 Ukrainian.
It is clear that only time will tell what really happened, but what can be gathered is that it is not certain that the Moscow authorities deliberately targeted the territory of Poland, even for the simple reason that it had nothing to gain from such conduct.
However, in the opinion of the writer, two probable conjectures can be outlined. The first is that these missiles may have been launched by Russian forces, despite the denial of the Kremlin authorities, towards a Ukrainian target and that, every wayhas been misdirected, either due to operator error or mechanical failure. The second could be that these missiles came from a S-300 systemof Ukrainian forces which were launched in response to Russian missile attacks on the whole of Ukrainian territory, but misdirected into Polish territory.
If one of the two conjectures highlighted were concrete, then we would find ourselves in the typical case of violation of the Charter of the United Nations which categorically prohibits the use of coercive force against the territorial sovereignty of Poland, with reference to the respect that the Member States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force, whether against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations (article 2, paragraph 4). Obviously, it should be noted that the use of force should not be seen as a real armed attack for the simple reason that Poland was not targeted. Indeed, it could be argued that the use of force employed against the Polish state was a border incident, for which the right of individual or collective self-defense, enshrined in the UN Charter according to which "no provision of this Statute affects the natural right of individual or collective self-defense, in the event that an armed attack takes place against a Member of the United Nations, as long as the Security Council has failed to take the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Actions taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be brought to the attention of the Security Council immediately and shall in no way prejudice the power and duty which the Security Council has under this Charter to undertake at any time that action that it deems necessary to maintain or re-establish international peace and security", would not trigger, and, consequently, the self-defense clause or formula of collective defense (casus foederis) evoked in North Atlantic Treaty; we are referring to article 5, which however requires the consultation clause set out in Article 4.
The expression armed attack also includes considerations of gravity and scope of the use of armed conduct, but also those of intentionality. States usually do not regard accidental uses of force as armed attacks giving rise to the recourse to defend themselves, as practice has demonstrated with the NATO intervention in Serbia which affected the Chinese diplomatic headquarters in 1999. The Atlantic Alliance authorities explained to the Beijing authorities that it had been an accident. The Chinese government declared that it had not been the victim of an armed attack. The intention required by the wording of "armed attack" excludes observations of purpose or reason, but it is what the state organs x they have directed a course corroborated by hostility against the state y. By virtue of this conjecture, both Moscow, and Kiev were unwilling to attack Poland. Therefore, it can be considered that it was a mistake that avoided dragging NATO into the Russian-Ukrainian war conflict.