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” in which “men with flashlights” were identified. “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 about acts of sabotage, but before the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish Parliament, a few weeks ago he also mentioned the possibility of drones and missiles falling that Moscow would justify as a mistake.
This Tuesday he specified that the new notices received from the Polish and foreign secret services, which he has not identified, warned of Russian actions in the first half of November. Following these warnings, the Executive sent “important police, border guard and counterterrorist personnel to that region.” The Polish media reported a few days ago of the reinforcement of the security device in the border area, with the sending of elite army and police units.
The Radio Polskie station claims that an alleged group, made up of Russian and Belarusian paramilitaries and identified as Black Rus, has been sent to Kaliningrad to organize provocations. The structure of that organization, if it has one, is unknown, and experts cited by Latvian media claim that it could be more of a component of a psychological operation. According to the Radio Polskie reporter, the members of this supposed militia would be trained by the secret services of Moscow and Minsk.
A hooded person who identified himself as a member of Black Rus claimed responsibility for a violent incident on the border between Belarus and Latvia in early October on his Telegram channel and in a video on TikTok. About twenty immigrants tried to cross the border. They were accompanied, according to the Latvian media, by three armed and hooded men who allegedly threatened Latvian soldiers. Those same people entered Latvian territory a few hours later, damaged an electrical installation, and took surveillance cameras before returning to Belarus, according to the video.
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 Russian military drone of the Gerbera type from the Baltic Sea.
This summer, Poland and the Baltic states, along with NATO allies, have held military exercises in the area, which Russia has interpreted as a threat. The Kremlin accused the Alliance in a letter sent to the organization's secretary general, Mark Rutte, of preparing to blockade Kaliningrad and assured that it would be willing to resort to its nuclear arsenal if the military organization tried to isolate the enclave. Moscow stressed in the note, which was released on October 1, that NATO's actions entailed a "high risk of leading to a direct armed conflict."
The Polish Prime Minister's announcement comes on the same day that seven flights have been affected in Europe 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.
Constitutional Crisis
In his appearance, which occurs in the midst of a serious legal and political conflict over control of the Constitutional Court (TC), Tusk has denounced the Kremlin's interference also in this crisis, at the hands of Russian or pro-Russian politicians, abroad and in Poland. “We all know the Russian method, which consists of getting involved in internal conflicts,” he declared.
Moscow and far-right movements have fueled tension on social networks, but the crisis and its origin are national. 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. Also to former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who like the previous ones has positioned himself 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.
