By Olha Hembik | 2024-09-24

WARSAW -- Poland, which has been one of the main targets of Russian propagandists in Europe over the past few years -- even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- is still facing an onslaught of disinformation.

Russia's disinformation operations aim to incite hostility between Poland and the European Union, undermine trust in government institutions and local sources of information, and to create information chaos and panic among citizens, analysts say.

Intelligence services started raising alarm about the information war being waged against Polish citizens during the coronavirus pandemic, when they observed a significant increase in the number of information attacks and fake news aimed at destabilizing society.

Since then, Russian propaganda in Poland has only intensified with the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

In 2023, VoxCheck, a Ukrainian fact checker, identified instances of Russian propaganda in the media of six European countries: Poland, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

Between February 24, 2022, and January 2023, analysts recorded 4,836 examples of propaganda -- an average of 403 per month. That increased from February 2023 to October 2023, which saw 8,296 cases, averaging 920 publications per month.

Most of this propaganda appeared in Poland, with 3,242 cases of disinformation from February 2022 to October 2023, according to VoxCheck.

VoxCheck also identified a "blacklist" of 27 Polish media outlets and websites that regularly spread fake narratives about Ukraine.

Polarizing society

Numerous anti-Ukrainian narratives have been observed in the press. One of the most apparent is that Ukrainians in Poland enjoy more opportunities and rights than Poles.

As a case in point, the cover of a recent issue of the weekly Do Rzeczy featured the manipulative title "Ukrainization of Poland. A Report on a Threatening Process."

The article's author, Marcin Skalski, known for his anti-Ukrainian publications, writes that almost mono-ethnic Poland will not be able to cope with an ethnic minority of 2 million Ukrainians -- the migrants who previously settled there and the refugees from the war.

He claims that Poland will face interethnic conflict if Ukrainian migrants and refugees do not leave.

More than 957,000 Ukrainians were located in Poland as of mid-June 2024, according to the Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR).

In total, the country has taken in more than 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the start of the full-scale war.

Russian propaganda has also focused on the narrative that resources should not be wasted on Ukraine.

According to this line of reasoning, the defeat of Poland's neighbor in the war is supposedly a matter of time, so it is better to focus on Poland's own domestic problems.

"By creating internal threats for Poland and other countries, Russia wants to stop these countries from helping Ukraine," Piotr Kaszuwara, a military correspondent and founder of Fundacja Przyszłość dla Ukraine UA Future, told Kontur.

"Hence, the fake news, sabotage, arson," he said. "This includes spies embedded among political activists and journalists."

Kaszuwara pointed to the case of Russian-Spanish journalist Pablo González Yagüe (born Pavel Rubtsov), who was arrested by Polish authorities near the Ukrainian border in February 2022 and later accused of being a Russian spy and a GRU agent.

González was released in a prisoner exchange August 1 and was welcomed in Moscow by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

All the while, propagandists have sought to cast Ukrainian refugees as criminals, fascists and Nazis. This narrative is often used by media outlets sympathetic to extreme and radical forces in Poland.

"Russia understands very well that Poland knows what Moscow really is -- it is a criminal group, it always lies," said Kaszuwara. "Simple propaganda doesn't work here. That is why Russia is investing financially to support radical organizations."

Anti-Ukrainian rhetoric

Another typical fake news item spread by Russian propagandists in Polish media is the claim that Poland is attempting to occupy western regions of Ukraine.

The narrative is as follows: Polish aid is not free, but rather provided with an eye to divvying up Ukrainian land among Ukraine's neighbors.

The propaganda intends to sow mutual distrust and hostility between peoples, analysts say.

Anti-Ukrainian narratives are spread most often by Confederation, the only party espousing anti-Ukrainian and anti-Semitic rhetoric that made it into the Polish Sejm.

Confederation party members are behind the blockade of the border by Polish truckers and the striking farmers who blocked agricultural products from Ukraine.

Krzysztof Bosak, head of Confederation party's faction in the Polish parliament, went so far as to present Ukraine with a bill for Warsaw's assistance, valuing it at 101 billion zlotys (€23.6 billion).

The Russian press picked this up right away.

"The Confederation coalition of parties, which many rightly consider to be pro-Putin for advocating the escalation of trade wars with Ukraine and actively participating in the gamut of historical disputes, does not generally deny the need to support Ukraine, but it considers it proper to use this assistance to blackmail Ukraine," Oleksandr Pestrykov, an expert with Ukrainian House, a Warsaw-based organization, told Kontur.

"We traditionally consider the 'help Ukraine only if it meets our demands' narrative to be pro-Putin. Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly popular, and if we look at the issue of supporting refugees, it is beginning to dominate," he said.