Special Services

The adequate reaction of the Government of the Republic of Poland made it possible to stop the illegal migration route on our border with Belarus. The authors of this operation failed to destabilize Poland and Europe with a wave of migration.

However, it was possible to create propaganda activities, attacks on Poland are still being carried out today, based on the operation launched in 2021. Adequate response to threat is used to attack RP.

The attack on Poland, which has been carried out since 2021, shows the scale of challenges and threats facing the whole of Europe. Threats that are demanding, because they are not obvious, the fight against which depends on the adequate identification of the real actions of the aggressor.

For Poland, it was obvious that we were dealing not with a natural migration movement, but with a deliberate hybrid operation led by a foreign state. The Kremlin had already used the Forced Migration Engineering mechanism before.

As Michał Wojnowski wrote in the ABW magazine, Moscow used the mechanisms of stimulated migration to attack states in the 1980s - against the USA - and in 2015 against Finland. Also, the migration route through Belarus is a Russian-led operation.

The Russians are deliberately using foreigners to weaken Western countries. The operation to destabilize Europe has been discussed many times by Russian military experts and strategists. The assessment is unequivocal – stimulated migration is an element of the hybrid war against the West.

This clearly results from publicly available materials and studies, such as the expert opinion of the Russian think-tank Center for Dynamic Conservatism (currently the Institute of Dynamic Conservatism operating within the Izborski Club).

In 2007, the Center published a specific set of recommendations for the Russian authorities. In the work entitled "Russian idea" you can read that Russia, wanting to weaken the West, should stimulate the migration process, because it is dangerous for the West.

In the opinion of the authors of the study, "Western society is the least adapted to real mobilization and opposition to a terrorist war." Therefore, as Kremlin specialists suggest, this should be used against the West.

"You can flood their cities with professional intelligence officers and terrorists from Eurasia and wage a well-coordinated, fierce terrorist war against the West," experts from the Russian Center suggest.

They add: “It is easier to use terrorist technologies in the EU and America than anywhere else. This is possible thanks to the influx of Arab and Turkish immigration to the EU and the long-standing ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States.”

The Russian military doctrine assumes the use of active means (another name for “non-military means” or hybrid methods) to attack the West. In order to realistically neutralize such attacks, one needs to understand the nature of Russia's actions.

The Polish government realistically assessed the threats arising from the hybrid operation launched in 2021. Unfortunately, to this day, some people do not understand how treacherous Russian actions against Europe can be.

Stanisław Żaryn
Government Plenipotentiary for the Security of Information Space of the Republic of Poland