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By Anna Koper
WARSAW, Aug 14 (Reuters) – The digital battlefield of the war in Ukraine has found a new, volatile front, and it is being fought for the hearts and minds of Poles. Russia has significantly escalated its online disinformation campaign in Poland, according to Polish officials and researchers, exploiting a bitter historical dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv over World War Two massacres. The goal is nothing less than to inflame tensions between Ukraine and its most crucial ally, sowing discord and destabilizing the region from within. This sophisticated operation is not built on fabricated stories but rather on the amplification of genuine, festering grievances, carefully manipulated to serve Moscow’s strategic interests. By poisoning the well of public sentiment in Poland, Russia aims to erode the political and material support that has been a lifeline for Ukraine. The campaign is particularly potent as it targets a population already weary from hosting millions of refugees and grappling with the economic aftershocks of the war. The consequences of this disinformation blitz are now being felt from quiet neighborhood streets to the rarefied air of presidential palaces, with Polish public opinion on its southern neighbor beginning to shift in alarming ways. Furthermore, with polling indicating a surge in far-right support, the campaign has broadened into fomenting anger against all refugees, threatening to destabilize Poland’s political landscape ahead of its crucial parliamentary elections, which are expected to be highly contentious.
The core of this information war revolves around the profoundly painful historical issue of the Volhynia massacres. Between 1943 and 1945, Ukrainian nationalists are held responsible by Poland for the deaths of approximately 100,000 Poles in Volhynia and the surrounding regions. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians also perished in the brutal reprisal killings that followed. For decades, this has been a complex and painful chapter in the shared history of both nations, a wound that has never fully healed. Russia, with a history of leveraging historical grievances, has found a prime opportunity. The most recent escalation was triggered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s decision to name a Ukrainian army unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the primary armed force responsible for the wartime massacres. This single act ignited a political firestorm in Poland, where right-wing parties immediately seized on the decision as a grave provocation. The tension escalated further when Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, a leader known for a tough national security stance, stripped Zelenskiy of a top Polish honor, symbolically rebuking Ukraine’s highest office in a highly public manner and signaling the depth of the government’s displeasure. This move, which played well with the hawkish voter base, instantly escalated the diplomatic incident into a full-blown political crisis, creating a fertile ground for external manipulation.
According to Polish Deputy Digital Minister Pawel Olszewski, the situation has caused Russian disinformation to “explode” across a variety of social media and official Russian media platforms, including Telegram. The posts, often translated into fluent Polish and featuring local social context, are quickly circulated by pro-Russian and far-right Polish outlets, creating a powerful echo chamber. An official analysis by the state-backed Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISA) has quantified this alarming trend, finding that online anti-Ukrainian content on major platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube increased by more than 250% immediately following Zelenskiy’s naming of the army unit. This dramatic spike was not organic. Researchers state with confidence that a vast majority of this increase appeared to be artificially generated through coordinated, automated bot activity designed to create the false impression of a rapidly growing and widespread anti-Ukrainian sentiment among the Polish public. This technology is proving incredibly effective at manufacturing a narrative that the Polish people have turned decisively against the Ukrainian cause, a message intended for both domestic and international audiences, hoping to influence policy through perceived public dissent.
What makes this new wave of Russian disinformation so insidious, according to analysts, is that it rarely uses outright falsehoods. It doesn’t need to invent a story that the country is being overrun by crime or that the Polish military is preparing for war. Instead, it takes a real, painful historical event like the Volhynia massacre and weaves a powerful, emotionally charged narrative around it. This strategy is proving difficult for governments and social media platforms to counter, as traditional fact-checking mechanisms are nearly worthless against a narrative built on the truth. “The event is real, but the interpretation is imposed by an external actor,” explained Wojciech Pokora, an analyst at the independent research project Info Ops Poland Foundation. While Poland remains a staunch ally of Ukraine in its war against Russia, opinion polls show a clear and present deterioration in Polish support. An IBRiS poll from early July revealed that 33.6% of respondents said their attitude towards Ukrainians had worsened following the recent World War Two dispute, while support for continued military assistance to Ukraine has plummeted from 78% in 2022 to just 52%, a massive shift in public opinion with significant political consequences.
The motivation for this foreign interference is multi-faceted, but the primary catalyst is the upcoming Polish parliamentary elections, currently projected for 2027. Polls show support for the far-right is growing, and the anti-Ukrainian sentiment plays directly into the hands of populist factions within Poland. Ukrainian migrants, once celebrated for anti-Putin resistance, now face mounting hostility. This shift has been so dramatic that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, leader of the pro-European Civic Coalition, was forced to issue a public call for an end to xenophobic attacks. Pollsters say that policy towards Ukrainians could be a key election issue that could decide the next government. With the Tusk government facing headwinds over inflation and domestic policy, the question of further aid to Ukraine, a major issue for the EU, has become a wedge issue. Polish leaders realize that supporting Ukraine will require political capital at home, and Moscow is actively trying to make that support as politically toxic as possible, hoping to install a more sympathetic, Russia-aligned government in a key NATO member state. The flood of anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian messaging is fundamentally aimed at shaping the political landscape to dictate who holds power in Warsaw and to what end.
In response to these findings, Russia has issued its routine denial, with the embassy in Warsaw stating that “the Russian Federation does not interfere in the relations between other states” and adding that accusations about Russia spreading disinformation to undermine support for Ukraine are baseless. However, Western and Polish officials remain unconvinced. They point to a mountain of evidence from intelligence agencies and the clear, demonstrable effects on Polish society. The campaign is a critical reminder that the information war is not a secondary front; it is the primary battleground for public opinion. It has the power to dictate the course of the conflict in Ukraine by potentially forcing the Ukrainian government to fight with one hand tied behind its back, starved of the political and material support from its most important ally. By preying on historical trauma and exploiting economic anxieties, Russia is seeking to rewrite the outcome of the war not through the battlefield, but through the ballot box of its adversaries. The citizens of Poland, having absorbed 1.8 to 1.9 million Ukrainian migrants, are now living through a psychological attack carefully designed to undermine their unity. The suggestion from experts is clear: while Poland must brace for the risk of a direct military confrontation often discussed in the news, the most immediate and effective attack is happening in cyberspace, where the very notion of truth is under assault from a relentless, disinformation-driven assault.
