Tusk’s partisan war on Russian interference Only Putin will win from Poland's political games

Since Donald Tusk was elected prime minister last year, Poland’s security services have had their hands full. One moment they’re busting Kremlin-connected spy rings; the next they’re foiling Russian attempts to hire Polish football hooligans to carry out its dirty work. Tusk himself is certainly not complaining about the positive publicity they’ve garnered. Despite his coalition gaining enough seats in October to depose the Law and Justice Party (PiS) from power, Sunday’s European Parliamentary elections are a chance for PiS to bite back. The fight is currently anyone’s game — Tusk’s Civic Platform party and PiS are in a dead heat in the polls.

To mobilise his base, Tusk has seemingly placed his bets on the reliable call to arms of national security. With Moscow’s escalating its hybrid war against Poland, he has seized on his country’s centuries-deep animosity towards Russia to bolster his own credentials while also raising doubts about PiS’s own loyalties — mirroring very closely the ways that PiS had itself vilified him during last year’s election season.

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about PiS’s committee to combat Russian influence, deriding it as an obvious political ploy meant to disparage Tusk as a Russian agent. Surreally, Tusk has now resurrected this committee for a very similar purpose, aiming its barrel at PiS and its political allies ahead of this weekend’s elections. His government has taken other pages from PiS’s national security playbook too — late last month, Poland re-established a border exclusion zone along its border with Russia-aligned Belarus that PiS originally put in place in 2021 and 2022.

The overt reasons for this are not hard to glean. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Belarus has continued, at Russia’s behest, to manufacture a migrant crisis at the border, while Russian agents continue to spread disinformation in Poland by, for instance, hacking into its state press service. According to European intelligence agencies, Russia is embarking on a campaign of increasingly more violent acts of sabotage across the continent, and Poland is likely to be in its crosshairs.

But just like PiS utilised this set of circumstances to go after Tusk, so too is Poland’s new prime minister unduly leveraging the Russian threat for political gain today. Fuelled by intense ideological rifts on everything from abortion rights to rule-of-law issues and the authority of the EU, Poland’s ever-expanding conflict between its two dominant partisan camps has inevitably begun to seep into its military and national security architecture — presenting a cautionary tale of political polarisation’s ability to undermine a country’s ability to respond to a potentially existential adversary.

The Russian influence committee Tusk has put in place, which officially started work on Wednesday, has important differences from PiS’s equivalent. It will, according to Tusk, not be an “investigative” body, and rather than sanctioning individuals outright, it will present potential cases of interest to the state prosecutor’s office.

Yet according to Bartłomiej Kucharski, an analyst at the publication Wojsko i Technika, Tusk’s committee will likely be just as partisan as PiS’s version, as it will possess no ability on its own to conduct truly robust fact-finding investigations or to uncover conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. “Perhaps there are such cases of [Russian] influence [among PiS and other parties],” Kucharski told me. “However, this committee doesn’t have the ability to really substantiate this or to punish anyone for it. In reality, this is an attempt to mutually pelt each other with accusations in order to limit support for the other’s political rival.”

Tusk’s committee was created at least in part as a response to the defection of administrative judge Tomasz Szmydt to Belarus last month, where he requested asylum and claimed he had been persecuted in Poland. Since his flight from Poland, a warrant has been issued for Szmydt’s arrest due to his alleged participation in information operations on behalf of Belarus and Russia.

Szmydt’s actions triggered a wave of finger-pointing by Tusk — in comments last week, he suggested that Szmydt’s connections to Poland’s enemies raised red flags about the man who hired him, PiS-era Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro. Yet the individuals who have garnered the most scrutiny from Tusk’s government lately have been former PiS Minister of Defence Antoni Macierewicz and one of his trusted deputies, Colonel Krzysztof Gaj. When announcing his new committee against Russian influence, Tusk claimed a “noose of information” was tightening around Macierewicz, accusing him of “disarming” the Polish armed forces during his tenure and surrounding himself with people allegedly tied to Moscow, like Col. Gaj, an infamously anti-Ukrainian military leader.

Investigators reportedly conducted a search of Gaj’s home last year, during which they found an extensive archive of military documents. However, no charges have been brought against him, and no investigation has been launched into Macierewicz’s alleged connections to Russia. Misconduct by such leaders is certainly possible — but experts believe Tusk’s increasing proclivity to suggest guilt by association in his campaign against Russian infiltration, often without any solid evidence, has the potential to rattle the rank-and-file of Poland’s military and security services.

“I imagine that certain officers who were promoted by Macierewicz may feel uneasy,” Marek Świerczyński, head of the security desk at the Polish research institute Polityka Insight, told me. “It would be a risk to the system if some suspicions about Macierewicz were to be automatically applied onto the officers who were appointed by him.”

Such politicisation of Poland’s armed forces would undermine critical components of their cohesion, hampering their ability to function meritocratically at a time when Nato’s security hinges on it. Beyond such practical concerns, though, Tusk’s accusations and the resurrection of his committee present reputational risks for Poland’s security architecture as well. As Kucharski told me: “The very institution of the state becomes less reliable if a committee arises that is really for nothing, that does not have clear goals, doesn’t carry out real work, and could really be replaced by two or three paid publicists who would argue that those on the other side are Russian spies.”

In tandem with political mudslinging, Tusk’s government has utilised every possible opportunity to underscore its credentials as a bulwark against Russian infiltration, even in cases where none exists. After a fire destroyed a shopping centre in Warsaw last month, Tusk claimed the incident was “likely” connected to Russia and arrested several suspects in the case — even though, according to Kucharski, the event was more probably the result of arson related to localised mob-style score-settling. In an interview with the Polish press, a former Polish lieutenant colonel dismissed the Russia connection a conspiracy theory.

Of course, Russian acts of sabotage are indeed taking place in Poland, and pose a serious security threat to the country. But like his committee, Tusk’s politically motivated speculation undermines the real work of Polish counterintelligence services working to uncover Moscow’s influence in the country, cheapening legitimate charges of Kremlin infiltration in the process. Ask supporters of either Tusk’s ruling coalition or PiS, and you’ll find people in both camps who are convinced the other side is working for Russia. This reality is emblematic of Poland’s political divide today, and explains why encouraging such theories plays well with both sides’ core voting blocs. Already, Macierewicz has shot back at Tusk with claims of his own about the prime minister’s cooperation with Moscow.

The truth, however, is that, regardless of the reality of Russian influence in Polish politics, its wholesale politicisation has only served to benefit Moscow, whose core aim in its operations against Europe is to foment doubt, discord and intransigence among its rivals. A polarised Poland where matters of national security are treated as mere tools to garner votes ultimately favours none of Poland’s actors. Generating anti-Russian headlines may help Tusk win a few more seats this weekend — but at what cost?

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