Polish conservatives have been among the most virulent critics of Russia in Europe for years. Beyond the rhetoric, however, their policies – and their ideology – are so similar to what Russia is promoting in EU member states that they seem to have been written in Moscow.
Are the decisions of the Polish leadership influenced by Moscow? A few uncomfortable questions
If Poland is at the forefront of the anti-Russian campaign in the EU, why did the right-wing government holding power from November 2015 never declared even a media war on Russia, if - as its leaders believe - "the Russians killed our president" (a claim related to the plane crash in Smolensk in 2010, in which Lech Kaczyński and over 90 politicians, officials, clergy and military commanders died). Instead, a special commission has been undergoing an investigation for years, headed by a man associated with Russian agents since the 1980s, and the result of its work are compromising reports, containing obvious contradictions, inaccuracies, illogicalities and manipulated data.
Why was there no quick, sharp, and decisive reaction from Warsaw to the words of Vladimir Putin at the end of 2019, when he blamed Poland for the outbreak of World War II. It took the Polish president two days to prepare a rather bland response to the shocking statement by the Russian leader.
Why, after all, in a country that has brought the fight against putinism to the fore, in a recent speech in Parliament, the Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro blamed Germany and the European Union for causing the war in Ukraine?
So can it be assumed, then, that the decisions and actions of the Polish ruling camp may be influenced by the Kremlin? In a widely commented interview for Gazeta Wyborcza, the former head of the Military Counterintelligence Service, Piotr Pytel said last year: “Law and Justice Party is implementing the strategic goals of Russia, which previously did so in our region mainly through special services, diplomacy and influencing the information space. The opposition and media are still unaware of the scale of the threat. People say that there are no Russians in Poland and Kaczynski and his party are responsible for the tensions with the EU because PiS’s politicians are stupid.” But Russian influence is a legitimate counterintelligence hypothesis. Often it is even as if we had a Russian governor ruling over our country."
Top secret information leak. Is it possible that the Russians were behind this?
Winter 2020. Every few years, the most important Polish test takes place in complete secrecy - how our army will handle the war with the Russians. A simulation game, but carefully written. It contains all the information that the Polish uniformed services have, data on the combat value of the enemy, mobility, expected directions of attack, logistics, all commanding and executive personnel, all types of weapons. Even F-35 planes and HIMARS rocket launchers, which are not yet available in Poland, were inserted into the Winter 2020 simulation. All staff members, thousands of people, took part in it, and the top officer of the Republic of Poland was in command - General Rajmund Andrzejczak, who was serving as chief of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces since 2018. Effect? It’s top secret, but… The exercise ended with Poland's total defeat after five days – after four days the Russians were already on the Vistula line and the Polish army was crushed. Today we know that the officers did not want to follow General Andrzejczak's orders because they did not understand them and considered them idiotic. The man who would command the armed forces if there was a real war couldn’t even win a simulated one.
We know all of this from newspapers. People connected with secret services couldn’t get their heads around it – how is it possible that information tightly secured by counterintelligence is leaked? Nothing like that is supposed to get out, because this type of data on the course of army exercise and the result of it is invaluable to the Russians. Even the officer corps cannot get such information because it weakens morale. After something like this, the head of military counterintelligence, Maciej Materka, should have resigned. Nothing like that happened.
So, could it have been a controlled leak? If so, who was behind it? Maybe it was about another reshuffle in the Polish Army? (After PiS came to power, many experienced commanders lost their jobs in the army, and were replaced by people associated with Kaczyński's party and loyal to him). This is still unknown. We do know what happened next: the information got to the Russian media. RIA Novosti wrote: We have defeated Poland, Russia is invincible. The other media limited themselves to the publication of specific data on the course and results of the Winter 2020 simulation, nothing more. And yet they could have made a great propaganda campaign out of it, so the unusual restrain shown by the Russians got some people thinking. People like General Piotr Pytel, who has worked in the intelligence agency called Office for State Protection since 1994, served in the Internal Security Agency, and in 2014-2015 was the head of the Military Counterintelligence Service (he left the service after the PiS took power), says that it looks like a Russian operation. It’s easy to imagine that after such an information leak, every American general, if he was to take part in an exercise with Poles, would have to think ten times whether someone would then ridicule him and whether the secret information of American troops is protected. “I thought that if I were in counterintelligence now, I would open up the case: isn't this a Russian operation? Because one of Russia's goals is to disrupt cooperation between NATO members. They hit the security system and show that there are no conditions for cooperation, they undermine the allies' trust in each other, and erode foundations. It looks like a Russian inspiration,” General Pytel said a year ago in July.
If the disruption and deepening of divisions among Western allies is the Kremlin's main strategy against NATO and the West, Poland, under the rule of the Law and Justice party, is an ideal country for Russia to operate. This is not only because of the anti-EU attitude of the Polish government.
Revenge-seeking politicians, weakening of state institutions and hate ideology. Poland is a paradise for Russian agents.
So how would it possible that in a country where since 1989 anti-Russian sentiments were openly displayed (in Poland there are no large Russian consortia or companies, and Russian propaganda has no power in the Polish media), Russian agents would be successful in such action like the leak of the Winter 2020 simulation data? First of all, the ideological convergence of the Kremlin and the Polish far-right holding the power: both sides use the tools of the police state, control non-governmental organizations, subjugate the public media, limit the independence of the judiciary, attack LGBT minorities, and justify all these actions with the need to bring order, in a sense of moral superiority. The Russians – as Western media used to quip – are opening champagnes in the Kremlin every time the PiS undermines the value of belonging to the Western world in the minds of Poles, as Warsaw relations with Germany and the European Union is becoming increasingly complicated.
Experts in Putin's propaganda point out that the phrase "imaginary community" used in the Polish president's speech to describe and undermine the idea of United Europe has traces of the language of the Russians in their information wars. They emphasize that the person uttering them is often not even aware that he is proclaiming the Kremlin message, because this is what the Russian secret services are doing today: whispering into our ears (mainly via social media and the Internet) things that are hateful, that separate us more and more internally and isolating us from Western world. General Piotr Pytel went even further and asks the following question: “Maybe someone advised Andrzej Duda to use these specific words? All international institutions, NATO or the European Union, are in some sense imaginary, designed to make us stronger together. That is why the Russians attack the institutions of the Western world precisely at the level of our imaginations. The GRU, the Russian military intelligence, sees the European Union as a military organization. What they care most about is initiating discussions about Poland's withdrawal from the EU. So if Duda serves Poles with a typically Russian message, then counterintelligence should be wondering where did he get it from?” said Pytel.
Does this sound too absurd? Now, when Russia is waging a war in Ukraine, it seems much less ridiculous than a year ago, when the former head of the Military Counterintelligence Service spoke these words.
The hypotheses from agencies investigating and catching spies are usually treated with disbelief, and those about Russia's influence in Polish politics seem preposterous at first glance. It is clear that in Poland the GRU or the FSB were not able to act as in Lithuania or Latvia, where there is a large Russian minority, Russian institutions and societies, and financial and business unions. It is difficult to cultivate pro-Russian propaganda in Poland because Poles are immune to the so-called Ruski mir. Therefore, the Russians are mainly limited to espionage work. According to information from Western intelligence agencies, Russia launched an action to penetrate Polish state institutions on the occasion of personnel purges throughout the country in the first years of PiS rule. That was the perfect moment, as politicians focused on profit and quick solutions entered the scene and that is the natural environment for the intelligence services. It's no secret that it is best to recruit sell-out officials who want to take revenge on their predecessors. Is not so difficult to corrupt politicians, especially when the government intentionally weakens, and sometimes even liquidates (for example by completely politicizing them, as it happened with the Constitutional Tribunal) institutions exercising internal control. Does anyone now thoroughly check the finances of politicians and their relatives? Are we sure that the top right-wing politicians or their families did not have any businesses in Russia? In Poland, under the rule of PiS, an oligarchy is growing, companies linked to the state are being created that are not screened, and the intelligence services have become less effective (they have been slimmed down in terms of people and budget, increasingly used for political ends, agents’ names have been disclosed etc.). It is a paradise for Russians.
Kaczynski has many reasons to be thankful to Russia. Is he consciously playing on Putin's side or is he being played?
The intensification of the activities of Russian special services (mainly military GRU) in Poland began after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and was aimed at acquiring military and strategic information. The Russians treated Poland as an area for obtaining information about the entire NATO. They wanted reconnaissance of infrastructure and military potential – as if there was going to be a war in a moment. Russian activities were registered by Polish and allied intelligence services. Something had to be done with the Russian activity in a systemic manner, and the solution was to set up in Poland the NATO Counterintelligence Expert Center. Poland and Slovakia were the framework states of NATO's CEC. The center was to be responsible for developing the Alliance's ability to counter intelligence threats. It was mainly about Russia, but it was monitoring China, Belarus and Iran activities in the region.
PiS, however, preferred to lead a crusade against the CEC (Antoni Macierewicz, now responsible for the investigation of the presidential plane crash in Smolensk, in 2015, as Defense Minister, illegally entered the CEC headquarters in the middle of the night – he groundlessly claimed that there had been crimes at the headquarters ), because the people who established it – according to Kaczyński and his party – were connected with Tusk (in the subtext: with Germany). But maybe if the Polish government had bet on the development of CEC, Poland would have been playing an important role on the eastern flank for a long time, and not only now, when the war in Ukraine is ongoing. "If we had the government treated seriously by the Germans, French, Americans, British - we could strengthen our allied capabilities and our role in the region," said General Pytel in 2021. But PiS did the opposite. It is enough to remember how arrogant President Andrzej Duda behaved towards Joe Biden until February 2022. And until recently, Poland wanted to build its security in the region on the Three Seas Initiative established by Duda.
All these activities of the Polish leaders seem to be carried out in accordance with the Kremlin's scenario. However, it is unlikely that the PiS leadership actually acts on orders or in agreement with Russia. Rather, it uses and follows the Hungarian experience. Anti-LGBT, anti-vaccine and Polexit movements – PiS didn’t come up with that. Who did it? It looks like the work of specialists, according to political commentators. Maybe Kaczynski signed a contract for consulting services with one of them – maybe it's someone in the likelihood of Steve Bannon, or recommended by Bannon himself, maybe a group recommended by Hungary’s Victor Orban; for now, we could only speculate on that.
Victor Orbán, who has never concealed his sympathy for Putin, may be ideal for this job – he may be Putin’s confederate, a bridge to manipulate Kaczyński, who has probably realized what he is participating in, but has apparently accepted it. “Kaczyński came to power largely thanks to the tape scandal (in 2013-2014 ministers, entrepreneurs, the head of the National Bank were illegally intercepted, and the recordings were sent to the media; the tapes gave evidence of the arrogance of the authorities and the links between politicians and big business). And as Grzegorz Rzeczkowski and other journalists proved, it was an operation by Russia's special services. Kaczyński must have been aware of this, but he accepted this gift from the Russians. Does it have anything to do with the fact that 95% of what PiS is doing is beneficial to the Kremlin?” investigative journalist Tomasz Piątek asked rhetorically in an interview in March this year.
The fact that currently there’s no direct coordination with the Russians doesn’t mean that there never were any contacts. Tomasz Piątek, who has been studying the ties between Polish politicians and Russian oligarchs for years, described a series of meetings between Kaczyński and the KGB resident in Warsaw, Anatoly Wasin. Today's PiS leader has repeatedly drank alcohol with a Russian agent, exchanged information on political issues, and even visited the Soviet embassy at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. The Finlandization of Poland was an important direction of the Russian intelligence at that time, so it cannot be ruled out that keeping Poland within the circle of Russian influence is still an important element of the Kremlin's policy.
In July 2021, General Piotr Pytel said: “I perceive what is happening in Poland as occupation. Nobody invaded us, but the PiS rule has the features of enslavement. This is not the life of people proud of "Solidarity", of the fact that we managed to escape from Communism. What was the Polish People's Republic? It was the period of the Soviet Union presence in our country. The Russians are looking for a sentiment in us for this period because they love it, but we don’t. But even this collective feeling was ruined by PiS, who managed to divide the oppositionists from the communist era into good and bad folks. PiS takes away the story that great people have won our freedom, changes history – like the occupier. This is a great betrayal. We don't have mafia here, but we are dealing with an occupation of thieves dressed in Christian robes, because money is their main goal.”
