Korybko To Ritter: New Evidence Compels You To Correct Your Conclusion About Poland

There’s no shame in being mistaken about something since it’s bound to happen to everyone, but those with influence like Ritter should always publicly account for their flawed interpretation in order to learn from it while simultaneously enlightening their audience with the latest insight of relevance.

Scott Ritter is a military analyst who’s widely respected among the Alt-Media Community (AMC) for his articulate arguments in support of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, but just like everyone (admittedly myself included), sometimes his assessments aren’t all that accurate in hindsight. Such is the case when it came to what he concluded about Poland in his latest op-ed for RT titled “NATO’s hair trigger: The Polish missile incident was a close brush with nuclear annihilation”.

His piece was subtitled “The fervor with which Poland and others sought to drag NATO into a war with Russia should ring alarm bells for everyone”, yet it’s now known that Poland actually didn’t intend to drag NATO into a war with Russia after all. There’s no doubt that Ritter sincerely believed that was nevertheless the case when he published his piece so his intentions shouldn’t be questioned, but new evidence compels him to correct his conclusion in order to avoid inadvertently misleading anyone.

It turns out that Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus impersonated French President Macron on a call with his Polish counterpart Duda the same evening that Ukraine accidentally bombed its neighbor. The seven-and-a-half-minute-long call reveals that President Duda was actually deathly afraid of the worst-case scenario of war with Russia and only considered applying Article 4 after the incident at most. This candid disclosure contradicts Ritter’s conclusion that it “sought to drag NATO into a war with Russia”.

In reality, it was always only Kiev that sought this apocalyptic scenario out of politically self-interested desperation to avert the Ukrainian Conflict’s emerging stalemate that would ultimately result in a Russian strategic victory. To that end, it betrayed Poland’s trust by lying to it in claiming that Russia was actually responsible for bombing that country even though there’s now universal consensus among Western leaders that none other than Kiev itself was to blame for this dangerous incident.

The prank recording reveals that Zelensky pushed this conspiracy theory while talking to President Duda shortly before Vovan and Lexus impersonated the French leader. Even so, Warsaw still wasn’t convinced of Moscow’s complicity, hence why it only summoned the Russian Ambassador and considered applying Article 4 at most, the latter of which ultimately didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it was those aforesaid moves that influenced Ritter’s conclusion, so they’ll now be clarified given what’s since been revealed.

Poland is an openly Russophobic state whose leadership shamelessly espouses this form of fascism so it naturally follows that it would politically exploit any scandalous incident where Russian complicity is even remotely suspected. This explains why it summoned the Russian Ambassador to lodge a protest like Ritter rightly related in his article, which was an expected political move in line with its leadership’s ideology and thus shouldn’t have automatically been interpreted like he did as seeking war with Russia.

Nor, for that matter, should Ritter have interpreted Poland’s intent to apply Article 4 in the same way either. Just like summoning the Russian Ambassador was an expected political move, so too would that have been as well since failing to signal this intent prior to the facts becoming clear (and thus resulting in those plans being canceled) would have been a suspicious exception to how everyone expected a NATO member to react in those circumstances.

Returning to Ritter’s article, he was also right in relating that NATO tracked the malfunctioning Ukrainian air defense missile the entire time, but he was wrong to conclude that the Polish leadership was aware of this when it summoned the Russian Ambassador or signaled its intent to apply Article 4. Vovan and Lexus’ prank call suggests that President Duda hadn’t yet received that information but was still treading very carefully to avoid sparking a war with Russia by miscalculation like Kiev wanted.

This observation confirms that Poland did not “seek to drag NATO into war with Russia” like Ritter wrongly concluded in his article. To the contrary, it was reacting in a surprisingly responsible manner considering its leadership’s shameless public espousal of Russophobia in all respects, thus suggesting that the latter is largely superficial and being signaled to rally the sharply partisan population around the ruling party ahead of next year’s elections as well as “justify” Poland’s regional “sphere of influence”.

Summoning the Russian Ambassador, which the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ official statement confirms was only to “demand an immediate and detailed explanation” of that evening’s incident with a Russian-made missile and not to formally blame Moscow for it, and considering applying Article 4 were thus expected political moves in alignment with Warsaw’s policy and not a plot to “drag NATO into war with Russia”. Ritter misread the intent behind those moves, however, which influenced his assessment.

That being the case, he was a responsibility to set the record straight with his audience in order to avoid them inadvertently being misled by his ultimately inaccurate conclusion about Poland. There’s no shame in being mistaken about something since it’s bound to happen to everyone, but those with influence like Ritter should always publicly account for their flawed interpretation in order to learn from it while simultaneously enlightening their audience with the latest insight of relevance.

Declining to do so could lead to those who extended credence to his ultimately inaccurate conclusion about Poland building upon his mistaken assessment to continue constructing an alternative reality of events that’ll inevitably make it more difficult for them to accept “politically inconvenient” facts later. An example of the aforesaid is the newfound revelation that Poland didn’t “seek to drag NATO into war with Russia” like one of the AMC’s most popular and well-respected analysts wrongly concluded.

Continuing to believe that it did in the absence of Ritter responsibly setting the record straight by leveling with his audience about why he got it wrong and what the latest insight of relevance might thus mean will lead to the paradigm through which those folks analyze everything becoming further divorced from reality. The resultant cognitive dissonance that they’ll inevitably experience upon related false assumptions about key actors’ intentions in the conflict becoming clear could cause lots of confusion.

It's therefore better for this trajectory to be offset as soon as possible by correcting their mistaken perceptions that Ritter inadvertently contributed to creating through his latest article. Trying to sweep such a dramatic but ultimately inaccurate conclusion about a key actor’s intentions in the Ukrainian Conflict under the rug would do more harm than good to the AMC, which is why it’s sincerely hoped that Ritter will publicly account for why he got this wrong and thus help everyone learn from this.