> NATO was monitoring the Baltic States air space from ground radars and from a Gielenkirchen based AWACS several hundred kilometers back near the German/Polish border.

There is also no place called „Gielenkirchen“. It‘s likely a typo of „Geilenkirchen“, which indeed does have a NATO base. But it is also at the German/Dutch border, while the article places it at the German/Polish border.

I am questioning the rest of the article based on these findings. They are straight-forward to check before publishing.

> ...based AWACS several hundred kilometers back near the German/Polish border

This should also have triggered the 'fact checker alarm bells' because there are no NATO bases in the area of former East Germany to this day (honoring the agreement with the late Soviet Union to not station foreign NATO troops in former East Germany - e.g. the only "no NATO East expansion promise" that actually exists in writing) - and AFAIK apart from the Eurofighter Luftwaffengeschwader 73 in Rostock-Laage (also not exactly close to the Polish border) there is no presence of the German airforce in East Germany either.

Although tbf, the sentence could also be read as the Geilenkirchen-based AWACS plane operating several hundred kilometers back (from Estonia) near the German/Polish border - which I guess makes a lot more sense than moving Geilenkirchen several hundred kilometers to the east :)

In any case I agree that it's a poorly written article and should be classified as fiction until confirmed by more reliable sources.