How Putin is sowing chaos in Poland as Ukraine war spreads across Europe

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“We are receiving information that Russia is preparing something big this year,” Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York recently, after renewed intelligence warnings suggested a planned Russian drone attack in Europe.

“I believe that Putin needs a pretext for mobilisation, so they could carry out a false-flag attack and tell the Russian people: ‘We are under attack, and therefore we need to mobilise,’” he added.

Poland has spent years preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia and repeatedly warns its neighbours not to undermine the threat from the east.

Last week, a Russian military helicopter strayed into Polish airspace for 42 seconds, an incident Warsaw said showed Moscow was testing the readiness of its air defences.

And on Tuesday night, Poland joined Romania in scrambling jets to protect their respective airspaces during yet another Russian strike on Ukraine.

But European governments increasingly see Russia’s most immediate threat not as a conventional military attack, but as a campaign of covert and deniable actions aimed at unsettling Ukraine’s allies and eroding Western unity as the war drags on.

Warsaw believes Russian intelligence has recruited renegade Ukrainians to carry out acts of sabotage in Poland, and suspects a deliberate campaign of sharing disinformation to undermine cooperation with Kyiv.

As Europe faces up to the growing threat of foreign interference, The Independent looks at how the Kremlin has stirred unrest in Poland, one of the frontline countries grappling with almost daily reported hybrid attacks.

There is a murky space between peace and war known in strategic parlance as the ‘Grey Zone’, covering all the ill-defined acts between states that are neither totally benign or overtly hostile.

Russia maintains that it does not seek war in Europe and regularly denies involvement in plots of sabotage. But European nations say the Kremlin is deliberately seeing how far it can push with escalatory actions that either undermine Ukraine and its allies or reveal something about European preparedness for conflict.

The most visible incidents have seen Russian aircraft stray into Nato airspace from the war in nearby Ukraine. Nineteen unarmed military drones entered Polish airspace after being launched from Russia last September, marking the first time Russian drones had been downed in Nato territory since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two,” prime minister Donald Tusk said at the time. Russia said there had been “no plans” to target facilities on Polish soil.

Such incidents have only grown in prevalence over the past year. Earlier this month, Russia hit a train in Yahodyn, on Ukraine’s border with Poland, shortly after former UK prime minister Boris Johnson and top European security officials had passed through.

Shortly afterwards, Polish authorities found a Russian drone off its northwestern coast carrying a warhead with a detonator.

Warsaw also accuses Moscow of responsibility for a string of cyberattacks and alleged sabotage attempts across the country in recent months.

Deputy prime minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said that a fire at a Starlink satellite station in central Poland was a deliberate “act of sabotage” and that “many signs suggest this aligns with Russia's new doctrine of attack”.

“While everything is operational today, we must recognise, as Prime Minister Tusk recently noted, that this is an element of hybrid warfare,” he said.

Several European intelligence agencies have issued similar warnings in recent weeks and months. Denmark’s defence intelligence service caused a stir with a new threat assessment that concluded Russia is likely to intensify its hybrid war against the West in the near future.

Hybrid attacks cover a broad sweep of activities from cyberattacks to stirring up internal unrest. The EU has since 2021 accused Russia-aligned Belarus of weaponising migration by luring people to his country to find an easier way into the bloc - via Poland or the Baltic states - than via the Mediterranean. Belarus denied involvement.

Poland subsequently built a 180km fence on the border to keep migration at bay, and then announced in 2024 it would have to spend $2.5bn securing its eastern frontier.

In July this year, Polish prosecutors charged a Ukrainian man with sabotage and diversionary activities on behalf of Russian intelligence, alleging he was paid to desecrate memorials honouring Polish victims of Ukrainian massacres in World War II in an effort to inflame tensions between the two countries.

Poland has offered sanctuary to more than a million refugees since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in 2022.

In the early days, they were met with deep sympathy, offered food and essentials and welcomed into the homes of strangers. But attitudes have hardened after four years of war, and Poland believes Russia is looking to exploit the disconnect.

Relations also soured between the two countries earlier this year when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky elected to name a special forces unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviets, Nazis and Polish authorities.

Poland accuses the UPA of carrying out a genocide of ethnic Poles in Volyn between 1943 and 1945.

Poland’s deputy digital minister Pawel Olszweski told Reuters that the dispute had seen Russian disinformation “explode” across social and official Russian channels, later repeated by Polish outlets.

An analysis by the state-backed Polish Institute of ​International Affairs (PISM) found online anti-Ukrainian content in Polish on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube increased by more than 250 per cent following Zelensky's naming of the army unit.

Much of the increase across those platforms and others appeared to be artificially generated through bot activity designed to create the impression of rapidly growing anti-Ukrainian sentiment, said ​PISM's Filip Bryjka.

Polish special services coordinator Tomasz Siemoniak warned earlier in July that Russia had ramped up its information war with Poland and was trying to create “as much tension as possible between Poland and Ukraine”.