WARSAW (Reuters) - Recent events show that there is a real risk of a global conflict breaking out, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday, after Russia fired a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile at a Ukrainian city.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the strike was a response to the U.S. and UK allowing Kyiv to strike Russian territory with advanced Western weapons, a move he said had given the conflict "elements of a global character".
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called the Russian missile strike another escalation after deployment of North Korean troops on Russian soil.
"The war in the east is entering a decisive phase, we feel that the unknown is approaching," Tusk told a teachers conference.
"The conflict is taking on dramatic proportions. The last few dozen hours have shown that the threat is serious and real when it comes to global conflict."
Poland, which borders Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, has been a leading voice calling for members of NATO to spend more on defence, and is itself allocating 4.7% of gross domestic product to boosting its armed forces in 2025.
Russia said on Thursday that a new U.S. ballistic missile defence base in northern Poland will lead to an increase in the overall level of nuclear danger, but Warsaw said "threats" from Moscow only strengthened the argument for NATO defences.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Peter Graff)