Polish liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s attempted judicial coup, which is a German takeover of Poland by proxy to prepare Europe for war with Russia as explained in the preceding hyperlinked analyses, took an even more ominous turn on Monday after a now-deleted post by the General Staff. In it, they warned that an adversary could exploit social media to organize protests, which many Poles interpreted as implying that the General Staff considers the anti-coup protests to be organized by Russia.
Their spokesman later clarified on X under the now-deleted post that “The right to peaceful assemblies is a constitutional right of citizens. Mere participation in a demonstration is not a basis for deeming it an element of an influence operation.” They also told the media that the post was scheduled in advance before recent events as part of their “psychological resilience” social awareness program. Many Poles weren’t convinced, however, due to Tusk’s liberal coalition already blaming Russia for their judicial coup.
Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski has since doubled down by claiming that “we are dealing with an unprecedented scale of cooperation online between Russian accounts and propagandists, and the global far right. This is an evident alliance. Or at least collaboration. This should give all of us food for thought about who wants to stir things up in Poland and who this serves.” As it turns out, the day before the coup, riot police were ordered to be equipped with machine guns and night-vision goggles for this week.
Coupled with the ruling coalition blaming Russia for what they imply that they had to do so supposedly save Polish democracy from Russia, this suggested to many Poles that Tusk permitted the riot police to use lethal force against anti-coup protesters on spurious national security pretexts pertaining to Russia. The General Staff’s now-deleted post is interpreted by those who believe the aforesaid as being part of a preplanned, but nevertheless “plausibly deniable”, messaging campaign in support of this decision.
To make this perception all the more compelling, the order to equip riot police with machine guns and night-vision goggles cited “the operational situation in the country” when none existed, and the police later claimed that this referred to “sabotage”-related threats. As more evidence that this was all part of a plot to paint anti-coup protests as Russian-organized so as to justify the use of lethal force for dispersing them, the police launched a major anti-“sabotage” operation on the border with Kaliningrad on Monday.
Putting it all together, Tusk and his coup plotters appear to have expected large-scale anti-coup protests all throughout this week, which they planned to disperse through the use of lethal force on the false pretexts that they’re organized by Russia as part of a hybrid warfare campaign against Poland. The police’s major “anti-sabotage” operation on the border with Kaliningrad might thus be a ruse to lend false credence to the aforesaid narrative that was concocted ahead of the coup to justify killing Poles.
The military is supposed to remain neutral, yet the General Staff seems to have taken Tusk’s side over the conservative president’s, who’s the commander-in-chief but can’t deploy the armed forces without the request of the Council of Ministers that’s led by Tusk. The sequence of events detailed in this analysis nonetheless suggests that at least some of their members, if not all of them, would approve of the use of lethal force by the Interior Ministry’s units against anti-coup protesters on false anti-Russian pretexts.
