By Olha Hembik | 2025-03-18

WARSAW -- Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began three years ago, Russian disinformation on Polish social networks has been directed at Ukrainian refugees.

The Polish audience is an important target for the Kremlin as Poland is playing a major role in supporting Ukraine and hosting about a million Ukrainian refugees, according to a study published in March by Poland's Scientific and Academic Computer Network (NASK).

Moscow's propaganda in Poland has evolved, said Kamil Basaj, the founder and president of the INFO OPS Polska Foundation, at the February 28 "False Narratives, Real Consequences" conference in Warsaw about the impact in Poland of Russian disinformation about Ukrainian refugees.

Between 2014 and 2022, the main Russian message was focused on undermining the Ukrainian government's legitimacy, said Basaj.

At the time, Russian trolls portrayed residents of temporarily Russian-occupied territory as victims of the "Kyiv regime."

During that period, efforts to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment on social networks in Poland intensified.

Since the full-scale invasion began, Russian disinformation has focused on domestic discourse in Poland.

Playing on Poles' fears

NASK has pinpointed three themes that come up most frequently in the disinformation campaign since the full-scale invasion began.

They are (a) creating a negative image of Ukrainians, (b) alleging preferential treatment of Ukrainians by the Polish government and (c) propagating a false image of the war.

The Kremlin diligently fans the assertion that Ukrainian migrants are committing myriad crimes in Poland.

Crimes committed by Ukrainian migrants often draw more comments on social networks than do crimes committed by Polish citizens, said NASK.

However, Polish police data cited by NASK show that the arrival of foreigners does not negatively affect public safety.

"On the streets of peaceful cities in stable and calm Europe, you need to provoke an emotional reaction of fear, and dissatisfaction with the government, which [allegedly] is not protecting its citizens effectively enough," Serhii Zhukov, an analyst at Ukraine's Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, told Kontur.

Propagandists claim falsely that Ukrainians receive larger welfare payments than Poles do or are living at Polish taxpayers' expense.

"The voices online are more radicalized, and there are many statements on the web that we can tie to Russian propaganda, trolls and bots," said Ada Tymińska, a rights activist at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Poland who studies Polish social networks.

Disinformation sources are trying to play on Poles' fears, she said.

"The public tension that can form among the Poles is more like fears connected to the economic situation, labor market and access to services," Tymińska told Kontur.

Creating a false image of the war

The third widespread theme in the disinformation campaign is a false image of the war.

"In the past few years, Russia has been adapting disinformation about Ukrainians to the situation on the front and to current tactical objectives," said Michał Marek, director of the external threat analysis group at NASK.

Marek has observed that the stories have changed, for example, depending on whether the Russians have had to explain away an attack or a retreat from Kyiv, Kharkiv province or Kherson.

Russian propaganda also promotes the assertion that no real war is occurring in Ukraine, using it to undermine international support for Ukraine, NASK said.

This sort of fake news is intended to arouse skepticism about media coverage of events and to dissuade the public from helping refugees and Ukraine.

To do that, propagandists use photo and video materials from conveniently "peaceful" Ukrainian cities.

"To escalate hostility between the Ukrainians and Poles, Russia is using every pretext in the book that can intensify this friction," said Alyona Romanyuk, a fact-checker and editor-in-chief of the project On the Other Side of Putin's Lies.

"Propaganda is effective because it exploits existing problems to stir up hostility, and those problems are compounded with fake news or incitements that people believe," Romanyuk told Kontur.

Russian media outlets and internet trolls deliberately spread information about Polish-Ukrainian territorial disputes to spur distrust between the countries.

These narratives aim to make Ukrainians wary of the Poles.

How to fight back

"We've already done a huge amount to combat fake news, but ... not enough," Basaj said at the February 28 conference on Russian disinformation.

"We need to combat disinformation in new ways," Agnieszka Legucka, deputy director of the Strategy Department in Poland's Foreign Ministry, said during the conference. "We can't look at what's happening now in the media space and react to it and interpret it as ... we used to."

"We need a renewed communication strategy in Europe and in the West as a whole," she said.

Disinformation needs to be countered with the goal of breaking through Russia's blockade of its own information space, said Ukrainian Ambassador to Poland Vasyl Bodnar.

"The scope of Russia's attempt to influence processes in different countries is global, and this is a strategic problem we need to combat together," he said at the conference.

In the face of propaganda, it is vital to use verified information and to maintain a critical eye, NASK advises. This strategy is the only way to resist distortion of facts.