AP fires the journalist who reported Russian missiles landed in Poland, but NATO will beef up defenses there anyway.
(Originally published Nov. 23 in “What in the World“) The Associated Press has fired the journalist who, citing an anonymous source, reported that Russia fired the missiles that caused an explosion last week in a Polish village along the Ukrainian border.
The news, though apparently false, exposed a fundamental rift between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western allies. Faced with the question of whether they needed to rush to Poland’s defense, officials from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and even U.S. President Joe Biden announced that the explosion in Przewodow appeared to have been caused by an old, Russian-built S300 air-defense missile fired by Ukrainian forces responding to the latest Russian barrage against the country’s civilian infrastructure. Not a Russian attack.
Zelensky has said he was convinced Ukrainian weapons were not involved and, as recently as Saturday, one of his advisors told a defense conference in Canada via video that it was too early to blame Ukraine. However much Zelensky may hope for an incident that forces NATO into the war on his side, the U.S. and NATO would prefer to keep Russia bogged down in Ukraine for as long as possible without risking an expansion of the war that raises the risk of nuclear conflict. That, unfortunately for Zelensky as his forces fight for control of the mouth of the Dnipro River, means stopping short of victory as much as avoiding defeat.
The West simply cannot take the risk that Russian President Vladimir Putin won’t make good on his threats to resort to nuclear weapons if the chips are down in Ukraine. With the war exacerbating global stagflation and support for the war in Europe wearing thin, therefore, Washington has been quietly nudging Zelensky toward the negotiating table.
In response to the explosion, Germany offered and Poland accepted a Patriot missile defense system that will reportedly be placed along the Ukrainian border. It remains unclear whether Warsaw has accepted Berlin’s offer to send fighter jets to help patrol the border as well.
The AP has replaced its original story with a correction and fired the reporter who wrote it, saying that the anonymous source he had used—an unnamed senior American intelligence official—was wrong. It’s unclear why the reporter, a former U.S. Marine who served in Afghanistan, was fired for his source’s mistake—unless the source didn’t really exist in the first place. Respectable news organizations avoid using anonymous sources and the AP requires that a news manager sign off on using one in a story and know the source’s identity.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of 16 U.S. Senators has asked the Biden Administration in a letter to reverse its decision not to send Ukraine MQ-1C Gray Eagle armed drones, saying they could help Ukraine win the war. The White House and the Pentagon rejected Ukraine’s request for the drones earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous U.S. officials, said Washington was worried the drones could be used to attack targets inside Russia, but in a subsequent story cited more anonymous officials saying it wasn’t because of this but rather because the Pentagon feared Moscow gaining access to their technology if a drone was captured or recovered from the battlefield.
No word on whether the Journal will fire the two journalists who wrote both stories because the anonymous sources cited in their original article were wrong.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has appeared in the Philippines, supporting global democracy against China’s claims to contested atolls in the South China Sea by pledging U.S. support for Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of deposed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr.
Marcos Jr. won his election earlier this year amid accusations of a systematic effort to whitewash his father’s legacy and appeal to voters too young to remember Marcos’ rule and martial law. According to The New York Times—citing an anonymous Biden Administration official—the U.S. is in talks to allow more American military personnel at Philippine bases.
Harris’ visit to the Philippines comes on the heels of U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s visit to Jakarta on Monday to discuss Indonesia’s purchase of American fighter jets with Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, who as a lieutenant general during the 1998 anti-government protests that resulted in the ouster of that country’s President Suharto ordered the military kidnapping of democracy activists who were subsequently tortured.
Democracy has strange bedfellows.
Lloyd is now attending a defense minister’s meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Cambodia, a close ally of China’s under its Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has held his job since 1985. Austin also met there with his counterpart from Beijing, Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe.