This is theater. A planned and staged propaganda campaign to get the masses distracted and silly. The easiest way to tell is if NPR and Fox news are singing the same tune.
We went through this last year with the chinese space debris "scare". A nothing turned into mass hysteria by the media and pentagon. Just look at the "hysterias" we went through the past decade. If the masses had a collective memory, we'd simply see through this already and ignore it.
If any of the news hysteria were true, we'd all be dead of covid, putin would have nuked our covid infested corpses and chinese space debris would litter our graves. Oh yeah and democracy would have ended because of a few hundred rowdy protestors.
I wish there was "news" to hold news accountable. I'll bet in a few months, this will all be forgotten. And we'll get another manufactured scare of some kind.