Kremlin uses disinformation to turn Poles against Ukrainians – Sikorski

When we hear the phrase “Russia has declared war,” most of us instinctively picture classic scenes from the twentieth century: tanks rolling across a border, artillery fire, burned-out cities, refugees streaming down roads. But Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski’s recent warning to Europe breaks that old mental frame. In an interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, he insisted that the Kremlin is already at war with us, but it is a war that does not depend on armored columns. It is a cryptic, absurd, and yet violently dangerous war waged with online lies, outrageous provocations, fire and sleeper cells, hostile drones, and the rather unimaginable image of pig heads being hurled at mosques to set communities against one another. That last detail matters enormously: a pig’s head is not a weapon in the literal sense, but as a symbol it is designed to enrage, humiliate and inflame. It is so crude that it would be almost comic if its purpose were not so sinister. What Sikorski is really saying is that Polish society—and by extension all of Europe—is being shaped by a foreign adversary, not through huge armies, but by nudging people toward outrage, resentment, and fracture. In ordinary terms, the person who goes, to work, checks social media, hears about a foreign family, or complains about migrants may not ever hear a shell explode. But the war operates invisibly, in the way news is distorted, in the way words like “Ukrainians” and “Poles” come to feel sticky and unkind, and in the way politicians inherit conflicts not from reality, but from some fairy tale written in a faraway information agency. The simplicity of Sikorski’s statement—”make no mistake”—is exactly whatever Europe still needs to hear. He is not shouting; he is not warning; he is simply telling a truth that feels almost too heavy. The Russians are not coming to pull down the gates with brute force; the invasion is already inside, itself spread inside every person’s own habitual inclination to confirm what they already suspect, and it is running on keyboard-like legs.

Sikorski names the most painful wound: “They use disinformation to pit Poles against Ukrainians.” The Kremlin’s “divide and conquer” strategy is really quite simple. In Poland, one of the largest waves of Ukrainian refugees since the war began, Poles were at first the most generous hosts. But generosity like that is a never-ending and exhausting plane. The Kremlin’s algorithm seeks to exploit the inevitable fatigue. It spreads videos, comments and bogus news: “Ukrainian politicians are indebted,” “Ukrainian men want to hide from war,” “Ukrainian cars get special treatment,” and “Poles will be forced to leave the country.” Each little story is a thin thread, but if you pull enough threads, a fabric collapses. Perhaps we know what this feels like. We see an unfamiliar busyness in a neighborhood, and a website or anonymous comment says that all immigrants are getting money while half our pensioners look at empty shelves. We start to think: “Maybe I’m not doing so badly,” indeed; if we are “defending” our home, we feel slightly less generous, slightly more closed. Sikorski pointed out the shocking provocation of throwing pig heads at mosques—a gesture useful for every emotion: it alienates Muslims, divides Poles of different faiths, and enrages the entire Islamic world against the West, all while making the Kremlin look not like an aggressor but as a mere observer. There is, then, somehow, a calm in the chaos. The Federation is like a single arson playing orchestrating small fires in the same forest and then asking why the forest is burning. Touching that the goal is to break the greatest crescent of unity that Europe has shown since the war. And thus the division of Poles and Ukrainians becomes of the most central objectives: If the relationship between the Polish and Ukrainian families, which is also proof that solidarity can survive, is set on fire, what hope is there for a bloc of European nations? It is easier to destroy an alliance with a doubt than to burn them from the outside; it is easier to make the heart of the West feel like a giant maze than to bring down its strong walls.

But the conflict is not purely psychological. In Sikorski’s sober account, Europe is undergoing an attack of state-sponsored sabotage, a strange and ugly part of the union because it touches the everyday. He speaks of polygraphs being planned more than on people in exile; of railway tracks sabotaged in order to derail a train loaded with a family; of multiple fires in warehouses and malls; of drones flying in and out of NATO and EU, possibly to test the reaction of air defenses and the patience of municipalities. Imagine riding on a train through your country and learning that the wrong screw came loose not by accident but by someone paid to take it off. Imagine a factory burning down on a Saturday morning, with managed loss of employment and prophesied supply-chain crisis, only to learn that a network of suspicious bots has celebrated the fact. But exactly because it is less dramatic than a missile strike, it is also easier to release. We can stop our attention on one murdered, but how do we react to a hundred sabotage incidents? When an act is not a single spectacular disaster but a fluid “low-level” there is no temptation. That is exactly the danger: yes, attacks don’t necessarily kill thousands, but they slowly rearrange the world. And then the minister himself goes on to mention that, only days before his interviews, “another Russian cruise missile violated Poland’s airspace.” A cruise missile is a quiet but rhetorical object, longer than a passenger, designed to fly (and above that it must be intercepted) into the territory of an ally of the world. The phrase “another” is the most frightening. It is not a first, nor a call; it is the rule’s continuance. The effect is something like living in a house where someones keep trying the lock each night. They don’t break in, but make you see that you’re not safe. Every time you open the window and see no single, the distance in your mind cracks a little more. That gradual crack—measured in small damages that no one can remember next month but that together form a strange wound—is the environmental consequence of Russia’s new way to fight.

The minister’s strongest phrase, however, is about memory and the age of his country. Poland has more than five years of experience resisting Russian imperialism. That is not a phrase but a resonance. Until the history of Polish-speaking immigrant children, of people’s long memories: the chance, the partitions, the uprisings, the soaked in sick and language. In the Polish memory of the “tricks of Moscow” are not written in a book; they are stored in stories in the family and in inscriptions. When the Bosphorus says “we know all the tricks,” we are hearing of a bond from people who once lived with a neighbor, but always looked at whether the neighbor was breathing. What changed, he says, is the scale and the fatigue. The grinds were smaller and slower; the new attacks are more frequent, larger, more impatient. The strategic hopelessness of Russia—the more it loses on the Ukrainian battlefield, the more it tries to destabilize the Western—is not a paradox; it resembles a wound. He is not only fighting Ukraine; he is trying to make the outside world too and exhausted to keep supporting the victim. If the Polish had a “500” special memory, the rest of Europe is fast. Europeans still think that “war is a metaphor” or “propagandating is a advertising campaign.” But the ancient Poles know that a state is sort of like a person. After ten years of quiet poisoning, it begins to lose its memory. The inability to remember what caused compassion in the first place, the inability to remember what causes contradiction, is exactly how Russia can feed the Pols to Ukrainians. “We know all his tricks” is a warning not to be illusioned by the new, but also for not underestimating the old. The amateur impersonation is calm: every safeguard—sustainability, mutual sympathy, government stability—is a target. If you know, you were born in Poland, you know because you have witnessed. The “500 years” is a milestone of Polish identity, and Sikorski wants Italy to be a source of strength, not a burden, for we must learn to fight with ourselves as with others.

The articulation of this looks like hopelessness in the face of his the agreed. But his last phrase, “what has changed is the scale and the desperation”, is a clue to the vulnerability of the core. The Kremlin started to destabilize Europe, then Sikorski says, to “break our solidarity with the victim of their aggression.” If it feels the need to break the solidarity, then it means that the solidarity is still there, and it is a danger. The Kremlin is stronger in the Ukrainian battlefield, and the more upset becomes the outer wall. We have seen in history how a ruler who fails internally converts a bogeyman externally to control a sovereign of the home; in this case, the oppressive formulae are somewhat similar: battlefield inability becomes more and more from a threat. Partly it is impossible to mention? But to understand that helplessness can also be considered a risk: no matter the threat, no matter the frequency, desperation is not a great fuels. A hurting animal is more dangerous than a well-fed one, but it is also more predictable; the same the resolute brute. This teaches us why calm must not be resignation. Sikokewho says “Europe operates” not with a cover that many do not open. In Europe we sleep with epose for a lot; the shutdown tracks blocked, and people in power continue to talk about “moving on” and “not seeing a aggression.” But in the same days, a violated somewhere seems to be just a line. On “everything, when a missile is not at the announcement of a full-scale air defense, to except that this continuation defines his normal. People are no longer responding to the word “sabotage” as if it was something special. The crisis of fear is now becoming part of daily life; this is the exact goal of the garden. After the third time, either because the cycle was interrupted, whether it happened in the picture or not, the feeling today is that we are effectively tolerant of aggression. And that gone, in a place, no beyond the walls has lost.

The final spoken word of this is not a cry for a battle, but for acquiring civic vitality. In the midst of the grand geopolitical rhetoric, a person is not all allowed to feel helpless. The only real defense against the divide-and-rule strategy is a warm and ordinary sense of personal belonging: seeing the refugees not as token numbers in newspapers but as human beings in front of the shop. This is you, the same family; the damage to rails is not an event, but a danger to potential travelers who may be burned; the enemy’s air demonstrates that keeps the whole continent from the world and in the same space. The agreement of state parts is important, but no verb, finally, can protect against broken values. If, due to the Russian lies, the Polish refuses to help a Ukranian mother on the street, if a Buran farmer feels abandoned by a food city, then the sunken stack has succeeded. If Poles focus on a Polish and not defending aka Solar? Or if the Poles as a coastal state and Europe fail to translate into a common identity and respect, Russia is already threatened. Yes, Poland has a common culture, countries, castles, but it also has only this new family, one of the same things, the historical conversation between the generations, the everyday conversation between the generations, the conversation between the generations. The conflict over Ukraine, by beating on European soldier, is not merely the Ukrainian war but a war over the future of all democracy. To “humanize” this content means to not allow it to sit in a limited place in the newspaper. It means when a family in Krakow is choosing that an absurd video of “Ukrainian” becomes origin of validation; when a colleague sees a satellite flight or the news, an old spring of the foot; the space. We will not need to spot but inside. We will not be undone by the tactics of detachment, but by skillful friendship. The last word belongs to a Pole — can not let our grievances decide when our common life is at stake. The “war” that this content describes is a lonely, catastrophic and diffused war. But to survive, we need not throw places; we must build bridges. Not the generic task of it is: if the road can not move the mixing towers, then this, emergency, is the time to face the Russian mind from “abroad” to “the presence” in every single street. In that way I can still be the greatest difference.