The recent excursion of a Ukrainian air defense missile over the border into Poland has given us an opportunity to observe the rapid evolution of propaganda along with the rapid devolution of mainstream media.
Two unfortunate Polish farmers, minding their own business and probably with no interest in the war occurring hundreds of kilometers away, became accidental victims of what appears to be an air defense missile gone off course.
The Associated Press immediately published a story, blaming an off-course Russian missile, based on a single anonymous quote. They were then forced to withdraw the story - and then fired the reported who provided the quote (here’s the current retraction). The folks at Zerohedge have some details on that story, which sounds like a case of scapegoating the reporter for decisions made by his editors.
While the Associated Press still pretends to be a news organization, The Telegraph has no such aspirations. Their original story was updated over the first few hours, reaching its current version at 1:37 am on 16 November. It’s less-than stellar work. For example, here’s the third paragraph:
Poland's foreign ministry confirmed that the missile was Russian-made, and summoned the Russian ambassador to give "immediate detailed explanations". (The Telegraph)
The initial story (filed the previous evening) indicated the missile was fired by the Russians, but by the sixteenth the staff had talked to some people who actually know something about military hardware, and way down at paragraph 36 we learn:
Dr Justin Bronk, a specialist at defence and security think tank Rusi, said the missile that landed in Poland could have been fired by either side. (The Telegraph)
Big shocker - the Ukrainians launch missiles too. And at paragraph 39:
Rob Lee, a defence analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that Poland's statement that it was a Russian-made missile, left open the possibility it was not launched by Moscow. (The Telegraph)
So at least the corrected (but still garbage) version of the story has clarified the source of the missile could have been the Russians or the Ukrainians. In an explanation that’s becoming a theme on this Substack, we’ll see later why this couldn’t have been one of the missiles fired by the Russians - and why this fact should have been obvious.
Headlines from The Telegraph
The image above is from that article in The Telegraph, published breathlessly on 15 November after the missile hit was reported in Poland (first version here, current version here). The original headline (at least, the earliest one captured by the Internet Archive) tells us “Russian rockets hit Poland killing two.”
We’re going to spend some time looking at that article’s headline changes before going into some details on why missiles with 1,000 lb warheads do a bit more than flip a trailer on its side.
Here are some of the versions, each time the headline was changed (and that change was captured by someone on the Wayback Machine, so we may have missed some).
6:50 pm:
Mr. Joe Barnes files his original, very short story about “rockets” hitting Poland, apparently not aware that Poland is out of range of artillery rockets (and not by a little bit). We don’t know what type or how many, but they’re definitely Russian because we already know the Russians are the bad guys, and all bad things are their fault.
Two stray rockets were said to have landed in the Polish border town of Przewodow, north of Lviv, Ukraine’s most western city, killing two people. (The Telegraph)
It would come as the first time someone has been killed on Nato territory as the result of an apparent Russian strike. (The Telegraph)
7:11 pm:
But soon after initial publication, somebody called Joe to let him know the correct term is “missiles.” Also, Joe found someone who used the words “crisis situation” and his editor told him to stress this point. Because we totally think this was intentional, I guess.
At least we’re sure at this point that the Russians did it. It must be true, because the U.S. said so.
Stray Russian missiles landed in Poland on Tuesday, killing two people on Nato territory, the US has confirmed. (The Telegraph)
Luckily for Joe the Russians can’t sue him for libel - because at this point he’s flat out saying they killed two Poles.
The deadly incident marks the first time a Russian attack on Ukraine has killed someone inside neighbouring Nato territory since the start of the war. (The Telegraph)
7:25 pm:
Joe is the junior varsity team (after all, he is the poor fool they sent to Odessa during a war), so they brought in some heavy hitters. Now the story is co-written by Joe, Matthew, Danielle and Nick. It took half an hour from Joe’s initial filing because they had to get Nick from the squash court.
We’re now emphasizing for our forgetful readers that Poland is a NATO country. (I’m not sure why the style guide at the The Telegraph doesn’t tell them to capitalize all the letters in an acronym.)
We’ve walked back a bit, though, and only claim “one or two projectiles struck a tractor.” We’ve only seen one crater, so I’m going with one missile for now. Also, based on their own picture it looks like something hit near the trailer, not the tractor. Whatever.
The headline’s been updated but we’re sticking to the “Russian missiles” part of the story.
Stray Russian missiles landed in Poland on Tuesday, killing two people on Nato territory, the US has confirmed.
Well, the U.S. source may have confirmed it, but Polish sources didn’t.
A Polish minister told the Telegraph the "investigation is still ongoing" into the missile strike. (The Telegraph)
It’s interesting that the confirmation from the American source comes before the quote from someone in the Polish government who says they’re still investigating.
9:14 pm:
We’ve added a Senior Foreign Correspondent, so this story must be a big deal. Rest easy everyone - Roland is on the case, and now we know for sure it’s only one missile. (I’m assuming he sent Joe out to count impact craters.)
Roland: “How many missile craters did you find?”
Joe: "One."
Roland: "Are you sure? Did you count twice?"
But the entire city of Warsaw is engaged in “urgent talks.” What did The Telegraph expect? Lackadaisical talks?
But now it’s an “apparent” Russian missile, and two people were killed but we’re not quite as blatant about Russians wantonly killing Poles.
Two people were killed on Tuesday when an apparent Russian missile landed in Poland, triggering warnings of a major escalation by Nato allies. (The Telegraph)
1:37 am:
Joe is kind of a boob, so he’s been kicked off his own story. Tough break, kid. It looks like we settled on blaming Russia so at least we have the villain of the story correct.
The final version of the story in The Telegraph ambiguously says a “Russian missile” hit Poland. This is some low-caliber propaganda and the editors should be ashamed, were they capable of it. The Ukrainian air defense systems are Soviet-era and many of the missiles were built in what is now Russia, hence “Russian missile.”
Poland stepped up its military readiness on Tuesday night and Nato prepared to hold emergency talks after Russia was blamed for a missile landing within an alliance member's territory. (The Telegraph)
Although we’re now just saying the missile was Russian made, don’t worry - regardless of who launched the missile we’re assured “Russia blamed for strike.”
Great big missiles
Let’s pretend we’re not incompetent stenographers who repeat whatever our anonymous “source” at the local Starbucks tells us, and ask whether the damage shown in the image could have been caused by the same missiles the Russians are using to target the Ukrainian power grid.
The front line is so far from the Polish border that this can’t possibly be the result of rocket artillery. The Russians, have, however, been attacking the Ukrainian electrical grid with longer ranged missiles - and they have both air launched and ground launched missiles with the necessary range.
From the impact point in Poland (roughly 50°28′28″N 23°55′23″E if you want to look it up on Google Maps) the nearest location in Russia is 600 km away - but launching from there would mean overflying Belarus. Some reasonable places from which to launch ground based missiles would be behind the front lines (800 km away), Crimea, or the region of Belgorod in Russia (both almost 900 km away). This limits the options for ground-launched missiles.
Many of the strikes are air-launched missiles, and Russian aircraft can get much closer than 800 km safely before launching. In addition, ship-borne missiles like the Kalibr have ranges of thousands of kilometers so these can be launched from the Black Sea.
Here are the main types of ground, ship, and air launched missiles the Russians currently have that are suitable for long range attacks on infrastructure targets:
Kh-101 “Izdeliye” (400-450 kg warhead)
Kh-47M2 “Kinzhal” (450 kg warhead)
Kh-59 “Gadfly” (320 kg warhead)
9M728 “Iskander-K” (450 kg warhead)
3M-14 “Kalibr” (450 kg warhead)
News reports indicate the Russians launched only two types of missiles (Kh-101 “Izdeliye” and 3M-14 “Kalibr”) that day, but we like to be thorough. The smallest and shortest-ranged in the bunch has a warhead of 320 kg - which is huge. How much damage does a warhead this size do?
Ka-boom
The Russians aren’t going to email me pictures of their warhead tests, so it’s time to see what’s available on other weapons. Most missiles used by the Russians are 1,000 lb class (450 kg) but we’re going to look at something much smaller.
The standard 500 lb-class bomb in U.S. inventory is the GBU-38. Here’s a stunning picture of some being used in combat.
Per the photographer, this is a series of six GBU-38 munitions being dropped in Iraq in 2008. The GBU-38 is a 500 lb (nominally) Mk 82 gravity bomb, with a GPS guidance kit attached. The actual weight of the Mk 82 is 241 kg, and it contains 87 kg of explosive.
Here’s a picture of a test of the Mk 82 bomb, reproduced from a report by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD). Weapons of this type can be set to detonate slightly above ground to maximize damage to the building, or shortly after impact if the goal is to detonate inside a reinforced structure.
According to news reports the Russian were using missiles with 400-450 kg warheads. As I hope is obvious to anyone seeing these pictures and the image of the overturned trailer, there’s no way the missile hit in Poland was an off-course Russian missile that was intended to disable a power plant.
That trailer would be in pieces, spread out hundreds of meters from the impact point. Any news organization covering a war should know at least this much, and have known as soon as the first picture was published that the missile wasn’t fired by the Russians.
But we could be seeing the impact of an air defense missile.
What happens when air defense missiles miss?
To intercept Russian missiles, the Ukrainians have their Soviet-built S-300 air defense systems. The standard missiles used by those systems are from the 5V55 family, with a range of up to 150 km and a 130 kg blast fragmentation warhead (so the warhead is just over half the size of the Mk 82 bomb above).
With a warhead of 130 kg one might expect a larger crater from an errant 5V55. But keep in mind the use of a blast fragmentation warhead means most of the warhead is the projectile fragments, not the explosive. We should expect a smaller blast than an equivalent high explosive warhead.
What in that general area have the Russians been aiming at? Power generating plants, most likely. Here’s a map of the impact point in Poland and the nearest Ukrainian power plant, the coal-fired Dobrotvir power plant.
On the big map, the two points are very close to each other, and an air defense missile chasing a Russian missile could easily be heading toward the Polish order. Zooming in, these two points are only about 43 km (27 miles) apart.
It’s very believable that an air defense missile, after missing its intended target, would have the range necessary to reach the other side of the Polish border. In fact, the impact point may be so close to the border because the Ukrainians sited the missiles where, they hoped, the border would be just out of range.
Air defense missiles are usually designed to self-destruct when they reach their range limit, so the Ukrainians probably sited the launchers such that any misses would detonate just short of the border and the debris would fall in Ukraine. But given the size of the crater (and its location), it’s likely the missile failed to self-destruct and continued on a ballistic path into Poland, detonating when it struck the ground.
An article in the Kyiv Post quotes a member of the Polish government saying this is exactly what happened:
On Nov. 17, Jakub Kumoch, head of the International Policy Bureau, said that there is a lot of evidence that one of the missiles that were supposed to shoot down the Russian missile did not hit the target.
“The self-destruct system did not work, and this missile led to a tragedy.” (Kyiv Post)
The article ends, however, by reminding us that everyone blames the Russians for invading in the first place.
Poland, U.S. and NATO stressed that Moscow was ultimately to blame for attacking Ukraine. The Kremlin said it had “nothing to do with the incident.” (Kyiv Post)
That’s a sloppy way to quote the Russian response - but perhaps something was lost in the translation from Ukrainian to English. Here’s the quote from the original AP story about the incident:
The Russian Defense Ministry denied being behind “any strikes on targets near the Ukrainian-Polish border” and said in a statement that photos of purported damage “have nothing to do” with Russian weapons. (AP)
Whether a bit over 20 miles is “near” the border is certainly open to debate. But the Russians are also emphatically stating that the damage wasn’t caused by one of their missiles, which is very probably true.
By the way, the final version of the story in The Telegraph still tells us a Russian missile hit Poland. Why bother with precise language when there are so many other propaganda pieces to work on? I assume at some point they’ll claim the core issue is that Russians build poor self-destruct mechanisms.
Some NATO reaction
All of the fawning media coverage from the west has apparently made President Zelensky a bit arrogant. Blaming Russia immediately for something that can be easily disproved is proving damaging to his credibility.
Fortunately for Zelensky, western media will continue to lob him softball questions like he’s Joe Biden.
Wrapping up
Once again, we have multiple versions of the same event - but in this case we can be fairly certain which is more accurate.
The simple, probably accurate version of events
The Russians are targeting the Ukrainian power grid using modern, long range missiles designed to destroy large targets. Some of those targets are power plants near the Polish-Ukrainian border, and one of the air defense missiles launched by the Ukrainians missed its interception.
It’s self-destruct having failed, the air defense missile ultimately detonated when it hit the ground in Poland, where it tragically killed two people. No one intended this outcome, and in fact the Ukrainians may have taken some precautions to prevent just such a event - such as the location of the air defense system, and the use of a self-destruct in the missile. What happened is tragic, but not malicious.
The initial, propaganda version of events
In a large single-day attack on the Ukrainian power grid, one of the Russian missiles missed it’s intended target and instead exploded in a neighboring NATO country.
The missile strike (and the death of two Poles from the impact) demonstrates the Russians are willing to strike NATO countries, so NATO should become actively involved in the war.
Reviewing the not-journalism
First, it was obvious almost immediately that this incident was not a Russian missile going astray into Poland. But by accusing Russia of something, the Ukrainians have at least temporarily moved the focus from defending their own actions to attacking Russia's. The propaganda never stops.
But as we’ve seen before, even a small amount of knowledge of weapons (or in other cases geography, strategy, etc.) makes clear the allegation isn’t anything close to reasonable. New organizations publishing articles like this should have zero credibility, considering how little effort or knowledge is required to see the problem with the original claim.
Once again, truth was also a victim in the ongoing war. Let’s hope that before the end of the conflict, trust in The Telegraph becomes a victim as well.
Splendid analysis. I agree that the photo of the impact site should make a pretty easy case that this very likely wasnt the explosion of a russian missile.