Belarus has protested to Ukraine’s ambassador after saying it had downed a Ukrainian S-300 air defence missile in a field. The Ukrainian ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry in Minsk to receive a formal protest. “The Belarusian side views this incident as extremely serious,” Anatoly Glaz, a spokesman for the ministry, said. “We demanded that the Ukrainian side conduct a thorough investigation … [and] hold those responsible to account and take comprehensive measures to prevent the recurrence of such incidents in the future.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/29/belarus-summons-ukraine-envoy-over-stray-air-defence-missile) 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 state-run BelTA news agency, saying locals had “absolutely nothing to worry about”. Konovalov compared the incident to one in November, when an S-300 believed to have strayed after being fired by Ukrainian air defences landed on the territory of NATO-member Poland, triggering fears of an escalation that were rapidly defused.
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