Poles and Czechs talk up links after “annexation” disinfo campaign
Polish and Czech officials have been highlighting the countries’ positive relations in response to a disinformation campaign claiming Poland wanted to seize Czech territory. Media reports say security officials in both states suspect Russia of being behind the campaign.
On Wednesday the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, put out an unusual social media post.
A cute illustration showed Poland’s Reksio animated dog and Czech cartoon character Little Mole smiling together at the two states’ mutual border. “Reksio and Krtek have known this for ages,” wrote Mr. Tusk, in Czech. “Poland and Czechia are true friends.”
The previous day Czech news outlet Seznam Zprávy had reported that a disinformation campaign was falsely claiming that Poland was seeking to seize a small area of Czech territory in Silesia.
This land was awarded to the Czechs in a communist-era settlement to a conflict stemming from 1938, and the two sides have long sought to resolve the dispute.
Seznam Zprávy said that security officials in both Warsaw and Prague suspected Russia was behind the deceit.
The campaign included a dummy Czech news site, a falsified social media post attributed to Czechia’s ambassador to Warsaw and a suspicious-looking “Czech-organised demonstration”, purportedly set for this Saturday.
Alongside positive proclamations issued in Poland, the Foreign Ministry in Prague put out a post on Thursday saying the neighbouring state was among Czechia’s closest and most important partners.
I discussed the matter with Viktor Daněk, an analyst with Czech Radio’s Plus station.
“It’s quite sophisticated, I think. It’s not just a random thing that would appear and then fade away.
“It was a coordinated campaign, where there was diplomatic communication that was fake, obviously, and that was published on a news site that was also fake, mimicking our own Czech Radio news site [iRozhlas].
“There were a couple of groups on Facebook spreading this fake news. And there were even calls on Facebook for a demonstration in Třinec, in the eastern part of Czechia, against this supposed move by Poland to seize part of Czechia, which is utter nonsense, obviously.
“But anyway, this is not a joke or a random attack – it’s clearly a coordinated operation abusing an existing dispute between Czechia and Poland.
“However, it’s a dispute that’s been there for a long time and that is definitely not going to be solved by means of force.”
This seemed to get more attention in Poland than here. They made more statements. Tusk, [Foreign Minister Radoslaw] Sikorski and the Foreign Ministry all posted about it. Here there was less of a response. Why do you think that might be?
“Partially because Poland in this story is the supposed aggressor, the one who wants to seize territory by force, which is not true.
“Radoslaw Sikorski, who you mentioned, said on X that Poland in the past, in 1938, annexed part of Czechoslovak territory and that had been one of the stupidest moves in Polish foreign policy in history.
“So I think there is a historical context that is more sensitive for Poland than for Czechia nowadays.”
The whole thing made me think, if Moscow really is behind this, on how many fronts are the Russians fighting in the information war?
“It’s bizarre how much work and effort they are putting into something that’s obviously ridiculous.
“But they do this systematically, over and over again, throughout Europe.
“When you read annual reports by security services, these are precisely Russian tactics – to use any opportunity there is to sow distrust among EU member states, to use any possibility there is to break European unity.
“And if there’s an actually existing legal dispute between two states, then use it. This is part of Russian tactics.
“If the Russians are behind it, and everything suggests that they are – who else would do this – it absolutely fits the tactics and the playbook that we’ve seen everywhere.”
