The Polish Prime Minister, the conservative Donald Tusk, announced this Tuesday that this morning, after midnight, he was informed of “a worrying movement on the Polish-Russian border.” “We mobilized forces and successfully avoided an attempted provocation,” said the head of Government, without giving further details, in an appearance prior to the meeting of the Council of Ministers.
The politician has stressed that “the Russian provocation and escalation can be prolonged.” Tusk has been warning for some time that the Polish secret services and their NATO allies, including the CIA, had informed him that there could be a Kremlin provocation in the fall. It has always referred to hybrid threats with a more military component. Specifically, this Tuesday he spoke of acts of sabotage, but before the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, he mentioned the possibility of drones and missiles falling that Moscow would justify as a mistake.
This Tuesday he specified that the notices referred to the first half of November. Following the warnings of the secret services, the Executive sent “important police, border guard and counterterrorist personnel to that region.” Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave located on the coast of the Baltic Sea, between Poland and Lithuania. That oblast (province) is connected to Belarus by the Suwalki corridor, considered one of the most vulnerable points on NATO's eastern flank.
Normally the area that most notices the consequences of the war in Ukraine is the eastern regions of Poland, but recently there have been several incidents near Kaliningrad. On September 23, a Russian helicopter violated Polish airspace for 42 seconds, during which it entered 300 meters into EU and NATO territory. A few days earlier, the army had recovered a Moscow Army military drone of the “Gerbera” type from the Baltic Sea.
The prime minister's announcement comes on the same day that four flights in Europe have been affected by bomb warnings, two of them bound for Warsaw. One came from Copenhagen and another from London. The authorities temporarily closed Modlin airport in the Polish capital until the threat was over.
In his appearance, which occurs in the midst of a serious legal and political conflict over control of the Constitutional Court (TC), Tusk denounced that the authorities see "activity of Russia and pro-Russian politicians in the world and in the country" also in this crisis. “We all know the Russian method, which consists of getting involved in internal conflicts,” he declared, and attributed the manifest tension around the TC to foreign interference, caused both by Moscow and in relation to the midterm elections in the United States, which are being held this Tuesday.
Social media monitoring organizations in Poland have observed a large movement of accounts associated with Russia, the MAGA movement and Western Europe with a coordinated attack against Tusk, as one of them, Res Futura, reported this Sunday. This Tuesday, the Prime Minister directly pointed out Russian figures or figures close to the Kremlin - such as former President Dmitri Medvedev and the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zajárova - or former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who have positioned themselves on the side of the opposition and the Polish President, Karol Nawrocki, in the Constitutional crisis.
"The defense of the Constitutional Court and the working conditions of the judges is a duty of the executive branch. And no one from the executive branch has the right to violently break into the premises of the TC, as the president did," he reiterated. Nawrocki appeared at the Constitutional headquarters in the early hours of Saturday and even struggled with several judges to force his way through.
This Tuesday there are several important meetings planned in relation to the crisis. The General Assembly of the TC judges is convened to approve the institution's budget and make decisions on the composition of a disciplinary committee for the temporarily suspended president and vice president, Bogdan Swieczkowski and Bartlomiej Sochanski.
The key to the meeting will be whether there will be a quorum to make decisions. 2/3 of the magistrates are necessary, that is, 10 judges out of 15. But the Government calculates that if two are suspended and one is a judge whose appointment by the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS)—whom the alliance led by Tusk ousted from power in 2023—they do not recognize, the quorum would be eight judges. That is exactly the number of magistrates appointed by the parliamentary majority of the Executive at the center of the controversy, because Nawrocki refuses to swear in five of them.
A meeting of the national security council convened by the president is also scheduled. The meeting was scheduled before the crisis to talk about the possible installation of a permanent US military base, but the TC situation will be included on the agenda.
The Supreme Court, made up mostly of judges appointed by PiS that the Executive considers illegitimate - they are called neo-judges and are at the center of another of the country's major disputes over the rule of law - has also called a general assembly. The TC is outside the powers of this other court, but it is expected to adopt a declaration in this regard.
The Civic Coalition environment, Tusk's party, has also called for demonstrations this Tuesday in front of the presidential palace. The protest is against Nawrocki's role in the crisis: on the one hand, for blocking judges legitimately chosen by the Sejm, which is the one who has the power to appoint them. And on the other, for forcefully breaking into the headquarters of the Constitutional Court on Saturday.
