By Kacper Pempel and Kuba Stezycki
OSINY, Poland (Reuters) -An object that hit and scorched a corn field in eastern Poland was a military drone, according to the preliminary findings of an investigation, a Polish prosecutor said on Wednesday.
Poland has been on high alert for objects entering its airspace since a stray Ukrainian missile struck the southern Polish village of Przewodow in 2022, killing two people.
"Examination of the explosion indicates that the ... object is most likely a military drone,"
Lublin regional prosecutor Grzegorz Trusiewicz told reporters. He said it was probably damaged by explosives.
Police had earlier announced that an unidentified object had fallen in a field in the village of Osiny in the eastern Lublin province, just over 100 km (62 miles) from the Ukrainian border and around 90 km from Belarus.
State news agency PAP cited a person close to the defence ministry as saying that the drone had no warhead, contained only a small amount of explosives, and was most likely a decoy.
Deputy Prime Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, who serves as defence minister, said the incident bore similarities to cases in which Russian drones flew into Lithuania and Romania, and that there could be a link to efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
"In this analysis we should not rule out a connection between the ongoing peace talks in the United States, inspired by President Trump, and the provocative actions of the Russian Federation," he said.
The Russian embassy in Warsaw did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
U.S. President Donald Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and a group of European allies in the White House on Monday, following his meeting on Friday in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
BLAST
The blast shattered windows in several homes, but nobody was injured, PAP reported.
Police said they found burnt metal and plastic debris at the site and that corn had been burnt in an area of 8-10 m (26-33 ft) diameter around the spot where the object fell.
"I was sitting in my room at night, around midnight, maybe, and I heard something just bang," local resident Pawel Sudowski told local news website Lukow.tv. "It exploded so loudly that the whole house simply shook."
Air raid sirens rang out for about an hour over the border in Ukraine's Volyn and Lviv regions from around midnight local time (2100 GMT), according to messages from its military posted on Telegram.
There were no reports of air attacks in those regions, their governors said.
(Reporting by Kacper Pempel and Kuba Stezycki in Osiny, Marek Strzelecki, Barbara Erling, Anna Koper, Karol Badohal in Warsaw, Lidia Kelly in Melbourne, Writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Sharon Singleton, Aidan Lewis and Tomasz Janowski)
