The death of two people in the Polish town of Przewodów after the impact of a missile set off all the alarms on Tuesday afternoon. They were the first deaths on NATO soil after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If it were confirmed that it was a Russian missile, Poland could invoke the famous article 5. If one of the members is attacked militarily, all are attacked. Warsaw convened its National Security Council, and the calls followed one another between the chancelleries of the member countries. Finally, Joe Biden reduced the tension by stating that it was “unlikely” that it was a Russian missile. Apparently, it was a projectile from the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses, which would have fallen on Polish soil while trying to divert a Russian attack. It is likely that US intelligence sources and defense technology were enough to clarify the matter, but the US and Russian military have maintained a ‘hotline’ since early March to prevent escalations on European soil.
On March 1, a week after the start of the war in Ukraine, Washington and Moscow established a direct communication channel between their two armies in order to avoid “accidental” clashes between the two nuclear powers. This telephone ‘hot line’ is managed on the American side by the US European Command, based in the German city of Stuttgart and by the Russian Ministry of Defense in Moscow.
At first, explains The Times, the Biden administration was reluctant to establish this direct communication channel for fear of appearing soft in the face of the Russian invasion, but later the need to avoid risks prevailed in the face of a war that takes place on NATO’s borders. and that if it were to expand, due to the fundamental principle of the alliance on collective defense, it would directly confront the two nuclear powers.
Beyond the famous hotline of the Cold War, this is not the first time that the White House and the Kremlin have established direct lines of communication to avoid confusion in times of conflict. The US and Russian militaries established a similar channel after Moscow’s entry into the Syrian civil war in 2015. At the time, Putin supported his ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the US … and its allies were shelling Islamic State positions and had special forces on the ground. According to The Times, in that conflict, the communication channel consisted simply of an unprotected telephone number and a Google email account.
