On a Thursday that ought to have been about regional diplomacy, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš found himself once again dragged back to a story that simply refuses to disappear. Speaking at a government press conference, he lashed out at the journalist who, months earlier, had exposed the details of an influence operation aimed at undermining Czech-Polish relations. That operation, which experts quickly linked to Russian disinformation, had pushed a false claim so brazen it was almost laughable: Poland, a neighboring country and fellow European Union member, was supposedly preparing to attack Czechia. The lie was never meant to be believable in the cold light of day. It was meant to plant doubt, to whisper suspicion into the spaces where trust had only recently begun to grow. And for the Czech prime minister, the fact that this summer episode was still being discussed in the autumn was clearly an irritation he could not hide. “What episode? The editor of that lying outlet blew it out of proportion,” Babiš said, publicly attacking the journalist for the third time, though he pointedly refused to say his name. It was a strange performance, at once deliberate and defensive. If the story really was a minor, forgettable provocation, as he claimed, then why mention it at all? If it was so obviously unimportant, why did he feel the need to attack a journalist who had simply done his job? For those watching closely, the answer was not about the disinformation story itself. It was about everything that the journalist had been digging into for months — and the uncomfortable facts that those investigations kept bringing to the surface.
The journalist in question had not simply stumbled onto a catchy story about Russian provocations. He had spent much of the year covering a subject that was deeply personal for Babiš: the prime minister’s systemic conflict of interest, and the carefully engineered transfer of the Agrofert holding company into a new trust fund. Agrofert, a sprawling agribusiness empire that Babiš founded, had long been a source of political vulnerability for him. He had repeatedly insisted that he had stepped back from the company and that all decisions were being made by managers, not politicians. But the reporting told a different story. In February, previously hidden founding documents of the trust were published, and they dealt a serious blow to Babiš’s account. According to those documents, Agrofert would not pass into the hands of his children only after his death, as he had long claimed. Instead, the company would be transferred to them the moment he left government office. That was a crucial difference. It meant that Babiš had structured his personal finances in a way that allowed his family to benefit from his political career sooner rather than later — and that his carefully maintained pose of separation from the company was, at best, misleading. Babiš denied the findings and tried to wave away their significance, but the documents were what they were. They had been filed, they had been hidden, and they had been found. And the journalist who had exposed the trust arrangement was now the same journalist who had uncovered the disinformation campaign aimed at Poland. That connection was not a coincidence. It was, in a quiet way, the heart of the matter.
The stakes became even higher this week, as the European Commission delivered its own legal assessment of the trust fund arrangement. The conclusion, for Babiš, was troubling. The Commission ruled that the trust fund did not, in fact, resolve the conflict-of-interest problem. Babiš, it said, remained in a situation of potential conflict of interest because the structure still allowed his family to benefit from Agrofert, a company that receives European agricultural subsidies. As a direct consequence, a portion of those subsidies to Agrofert companies has been suspended. This was not merely an abstract legal opinion. It was a concrete, financial, and embarrassing blow, delivered by an institution that Babiš could not simply dismiss as a lying journalist or a political enemy. And so, when the prime minister stood before the cameras and attacked the editor of “that lying outlet,” he was not really talking about a fabricated story about Poland attacking Czechia. He was talking about a journalist who had spent months documenting the gap between Babiš’s public assurances and his private financial arrangements. He was talking about a reporter who had traced the flow of money from European taxpayers into a trust fund designed to keep his children comfortable. He was talking about a man whose reporting had helped to bring about a Brussels decision that could cost millions of euros and cast a long shadow over his political legacy. Publicly attacking a journalist, in this context, was less a defense against a false story and more an act of displaced frustration. It was easier to portray a reporter as an enemy than to face the mirror that the reporting held up.
But Babiš did not stop there. Before leaving for the Visegrád Four meeting in Bratislava, he offered a strange and contradictory assessment of the disinformation operation itself. On the one hand, he said, “People didn’t even notice it. People aren’t stupid. Nobody noticed it.” On the other hand, he complained that the intelligence services had not done their job. He criticized them for failing to inform him in time about the provocation — even though, by his own logic, there was nothing to be informed about. You cannot have it both ways. If the story was so obviously false and so easily ignored, then the intelligence services could hardly be blamed for not treating it as a national emergency. If, however, they should have detected it earlier and warned him, then the story was not entirely insignificant. This was the thinking of a man trying to minimize a wound while also making sure that someone else took the blame for it. And it revealed a deep misunderstanding of how disinformation actually works. A false narrative does not have to dominate the front pages to succeed. It does not have to become the talk of the whole country. Sometimes it is enough to plant a small seed of doubt, to reopen an old wound, to create a crack in a relationship that has taken years to repair. The claim that Poland was preparing to attack Czechia was so absurd that many people did not believe it. But some people did. Some people, already predisposed to suspicion or influenced by older tribal loyalties, might have wondered whether there was a grain of truth beneath the absurdity. And that wondering, that small hesitation, is exactly what a successful influence operation is designed to produce. It is not about winning a national debate. It is about creating background noise, about making trust just a little harder, about leaving a trace that can be activated again in the future. Babiš’s insistence that nobody noticed missed the point entirely.
Fortunately, not everyone in the region was so determined to wave the incident away. Around the same time that Babiš was attacking journalists, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was recording a video for social media, aboard a plane bound for Bratislava. In his hands, he held up a toy mole — a simple, slightly playful object — and said that he was bringing it to Babiš as a gift. The symbolism was clear. The mole, in Czech and Polish popular culture, is a character that digs beneath the surface and emerges where you least expect it, a creature that burrows into the ground and disturbs the order above. But Tusk used it to make a larger point. He began by recalling the recent Russian provocation, the false claim that Poland wanted to attack Czechia. Then he praised the response of both nations. Czechs and Poles, he said, had reacted brilliantly. They had confirmed to each other that they are friends, and that no one would drive a wedge between them. It took less than a minute. There were no press conferences, no official statements, no lengthy lectures about hybrid threats. Tusk understood that the most effective answer to a disinformation campaign is not always a detailed rebuttal. Sometimes it is a simple, human gesture that communicates something far more powerful: we saw it, we understand it, and we are not afraid. By holding up the toy mole, Tusk was making a joke, but he was also making history. He was reminding everyone that the relationship between the Czech and Polish people is stronger than any fragment of Russian propaganda. He was speaking directly to ordinary people, not to diplomats or experts, in a language that everyone could understand. And in doing so, he offered a masterclass in strategic communication — the very thing that Babiš seemed to think Czechia did not need.
The contrast between the two approaches could not be more telling. On one side, there was a prime minister who publicly attacked a journalist for the third time, insisted that people did not notice the provocation, criticized intelligence agencies, and yet could not stop talking about a story that he claimed was unimportant. On the other side, there was a prime minister who used a toy mole and a short social media video to turn the entire episode into a moment of friendship and resilience. The difference was not simply style. It was substance. Tusk understood that disinformation is not neutralized by pretending it does not exist. It is neutralized by acknowledging it, naming it, and answering it with something even more human — humor, solidarity, and a clear, emotional commitment to the people on the other side of the border. Babiš, by contrast, seemed trapped in a spiral of defensiveness, unable to see that his repeated attacks on a journalist only drew more attention to the uncomfortable stories that journalist was telling. He was right about one thing: people are not stupid. They can see when a politician is deflecting. They can sense when there is something beneath the surface of a denial. And they can certainly tell the difference between a leader who builds bridges and a leader who attacks the messengers trying to hold him accountable. The summer provocation, for all its absurdity, has become a small mirror held up to the region. In that mirror, we see two very different ways of dealing with trouble. One is grounded in fear, pride, and the desire to control the story. The other is grounded in trust, openness, and a recognition that the best defense against lies is not silence, but honest conversation. History may not remember the toy mole for very long, but it will remember the lesson: those who try to divide us will fail if we refuse to be divided. And the sooner leaders understand that, the safer we will all be.