For months, a quiet but deliberate storm has been building in Poland’s information space. Russian operatives, Polish officials and independent researchers now say, are aggressively exploiting a painful historical dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv over World War Two massacres in order to drive a wedge between Poland and Ukraine. The campaign, largely carried out in Polish on social media, is not just about the past. It is also aimed at stoking public anger against Ukrainian refugees, deepening fatigue with the war, and feeding the rise of far-right politics ahead of Poland’s closely contested parliamentary elections in 2027. At the heart of this effort lies the Volhynia massacres, a deeply traumatic chapter in which Poland says Ukrainian insurgents killed around 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945, with thousands of Ukrainians dying in reprisal killings. The dispute had simmered for decades, but it exploded into the open when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy named an army unit after the insurgents who carried out the massacres. Poland’s hard-right President, Karol Nawrocki, responded in June by stripping Zelenskiy of a top Polish honor, and in an instant, old wounds were reopened—not only in bilateral diplomacy but across the Polish internet, where Russian-backed accounts were waiting to pour fuel on the flames.
Polish Deputy Digital Minister Pawel Olszewski told Reuters that the controversy saw Russian disinformation “explode” on both social media and official Russian platforms, including Telegram, with much of the content later echoed by Polish outlets. The scale of the surge was documented by the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM), a state-backed research body. PISM found that anti-Ukrainian content in Polish on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube increased by more than 250% in the immediate aftermath of Zelenskiy’s decision. According to Filip Bryjka, a PISM analyst, much of that increase appeared to be artificially generated through bot activity, designed to create the illusion of a rapidly growing wave of anti-Ukrainian sentiment. Synthetic accounts amplified hashtags, boosted emotional posts, and made fringe voices seem mainstream. The goal was not necessarily to win a debate, but to make Polish society feel as though everyone had turned against Ukraine. By manufacturing online momentum, the campaign hoped to accelerate a real-world shift in public opinion—one that could eventually have consequences for NATO’s eastern flank and the Western alliance at a time when Ukraine depends on Poland’s political and military support more than ever.
What makes the current Russian campaign so insidious, analysts say, is that it relies less on fabricating lies than on weaponizing real events. In the past, Russian disinformation often involved outlandish fake stories and obvious forgeries. This time, the underlying facts are true: the massacres did happen, the army unit controversy is real, and there are genuine grievances between Warsaw and Kyiv. The twist comes in how those facts are framed, amplified, and invested with a particular interpretation. “The event is real, but the interpretation is imposed by an external actor,” said Wojciech Pokora, an analyst at Info Ops Poland Foundation, an independent research project. This is a far more dangerous tactic, because it is much harder to identify and counter than conventional fake news. Fact-checkers cannot simply debunk it. Polish users are not being told that black is white; they are being told that their old suspicions about Ukraine are justified, that their government has ignored their pain, and that Ukraine is ungrateful. By tapping into genuine historical memory and current frustration, the campaign makes its audience complicit in its own manipulation. The intended message is simple: Poland cannot trust Ukraine, and Ukrainian refugees are a burden, not brothers in arms. The tragedy of Volhynia becomes a cudgel, and every real dispute—over history, grain imports, or political symbolism—is magnified and distorted to serve Moscow’s broader strategic aim of weakening Ukraine’s most important neighbor.
Moscow, predictably, denies any involvement. The Russian embassy in Warsaw said in an emailed statement that “The Russian Federation does not interfere in the relations between other states” and dismissed accusations about spreading disinformation to undermine support for Ukraine as baseless. It echoed a familiar Kremlin refrain: Western leaders are exaggerating the Russian threat for their own political ends. But officials and independent researchers in Poland are not persuaded. They point to the scale and coordination of the online activity, the sudden surge in Polish-language content immediately after a politically sensitive event, and the way in which Russian state media amplified the controversy on Telegram before it spread to Polish social networks. The pattern, they argue, is all too familiar. The challenge is that because the foundation of the narrative is not a lie, traditional responses—such as debunking or platform takedowns—are less effective. The damage is done in the space between facts and interpretation, where emotion thrives. Historical pain is real, and foreign actors are skilled at connecting it to present-day anxieties: the strain of hosting an estimated 1.8 to 1.9 million Ukrainian migrants, disputes over grain exports that have hurt Polish farmers, and a general sense of war fatigue that has grown after years of conflict. These are not invented grievances; they are lived experiences. And when a foreign actor comes along and promises to validate those feelings, it becomes very hard for Polish institutions to persuade ordinary people that they are being manipulated.
The measurable effects are already visible. An IBRiS poll published in early July found that 33.6% of respondents said their attitude toward Ukrainians had worsened in the aftermath of the World War Two dispute. Another IBRiS survey, also published last month, showed that support for continued military assistance to Ukraine had fallen to 52%—a dramatic drop from 78% in 2022. While these numbers reflect genuine societal fatigue and complex political dynamics, the disinformation campaign has clearly accelerated the slide. Deputy Digital Minister Olszewski acknowledged that the flood of hostile content has “fallen on fertile ground.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a pro-European centrist, has felt compelled to speak out against mounting hostility toward Ukrainians living in Poland, calling for an end to xenophobic attacks. Ukrainian migrants have reported harassment and rising tension in a country that once welcomed them with open arms and humanitarian kindness. The change has been sharp and painful. Many Poles still remember the early weeks of the war, when millions of Ukrainian refugees arrived and Polish families opened their homes. Now, that memory is being deliberately overlaid with suspicion and resentment. The question is how much of this shift is organic, how much is manufactured, and whether the distinction matters anymore to ordinary citizens who feel their generosity has been taken for granted.
For Polish politics, the stakes are enormous. Pollsters say that policy toward Ukrainians could be a key election theme in 2027, and the electoral landscape is already treacherous for Tusk’s government. The ruling pro-European coalition is struggling to hold onto public support, with the far right gaining ground by tapping into anti-migrant sentiment and nationalist grievances. In such an environment, a steady stream of Russian-influenced content, designed to amplify every controversy, could tip the scales. The long-term danger is not just that Poland might reduce aid to Ukraine, but that the entire Polish-Ukrainian alliance, which is fundamental to Eastern European security, could be quietly eroded from within. Russian strategists do not need to win the Polish election; they only need to make the relationship so toxic that no Polish government can easily defend Ukraine in the future. And they are doing it not by invading, but by poisoning the well of public perception—using history, fear, and exhaustion as their weapons. The officials and experts who track these operations warn that democratic societies must become more resilient to this kind of information warfare. That means not only identifying bots and takedowns, but also addressing the real grievances upon which the disinformation feeds. Poland, like much of Europe, is now in a strange and uncomfortable war, one fought not with tanks and missiles but with old memories and new algorithms. And in that war, the first casualty is always trust.