Polish missile strike as presented by Iran’s Press TV
I am pleased to offer readers a glimpse at how Iranian television frames discussion of one of the past week’s most fraught issues in international affairs: the missile strike on Poland that was intended by its authors at Ukraine’s air defense command to trigger invocation of NATO’s Article 5, leading to a hot war between the Alliance and the Russian Federation.
In this brief video, I pointed out that the Russians’ characterization of this incident as an intentional ‘provocation’ rather than an accident has been ignored by Western media. However, as talks shows on Russian state television are bringing out, there are good reasons to consider what happened as a well planned as opposed to fortuitous event coming as it did when the G20 was still assembled in Bali and when a barrage of Russian cruise missile attacks on energy infrastructure across the country was continuing.
Russian experts have noted that the S300 air defense missiles can in fact be flown in two modes: to shoot down aircraft or as a ground to ground missile. In the former mode, its inbuilt self-destruct mechanism is activated, so that if it misses its target in the air, it can cause no damage when it falls back to earth. In the second mode, the self-destruct mechanism is switched off so that the explosive charge can be detonated upon impact with earth. It was precisely in the second mode that the S300 which came down in Poland was flying, meaning that the damage and loss of life which occurred was planned by the launch team.
I use this opportunity to bring to readers’ attention another key point about Russian military operations over this past week, namely that during what Mr. Blinken and other American or European spokesmen have called the ‘barbarous’ Russian air assault on Ukraine not a single person died on the ground. This speaks to the very precise operation of the Russian attack missiles and those programming them. This contrasts sharply with the indiscriminate missile and artillery attacks by Ukraine on towns and settlements of the Donbas this past week using American-supplied howitzers which caused loss of several lives and heavy injuries to still more civilians.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
See link to Press TV: Russian diplomat says Ukraine, Poland seeking to provoke war between Russia, NATO