About 200 police officers have been conducting a search of the area where the object was detected in case the missile landed on Polish territory.

Poland is a member of the Nato alliance, and Polish and Allied aircraft were scrambled in response to the incident at around 07:00 (06:00 GMT) on Friday.

Krzysztof Komorski, the president of the Lublin Voivodship [equivalent to a province or region] wrote on social media: “Please be calm and patient, the services are working.”

In a harmless but more embarrassing incident from December last year, an object believed to have been an unarmed Russian Kh-55 cruise missile was fired from Belarus and crossed around 500km of Polish territory before landing in a forest.

The object, which was detected by Polish air defences at the time, was only found in April this year by a passer-by not far from the city of Bydgoszcz in central Poland.

His predecessor, Mariusz Blaszczak, from the right-wing Law and Justice-led government that lost power in an election in October and served as defence minister during the two earlier events, responded: "We don’t know what fell in the area of Tomaszow Lubelski.

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