Polish-Ukrainian ties remain troubled despite the return to power of Berlin-backed Donald Tusk as Prime Minister, who pledged to repair the damage that he blames his conservative-nationalist predecessors for inflicting on them even though they were just defending Poland’s legitimate national interests. His inability to prevent the popular farmers protests from resuming prompted Lvov Mayor Andrey Sadovoy to smear those activists as “pro-Russian provocateurs” last month, which is a deep insult to most Poles.
This was followed by Ukrainska Pravda publishing a report about “How Poland continues to import Russian agricultural products”, which in turn preceded Politico combining both narratives to more openly suggest that Russian meddling and agricultural influence are behind their latest problems. The reality is that not a single protester was arrested on espionage charges, however, and official statistics prove that Poland imported only 12,694 tonnes of grain from Russia in 2023 compared to 1 million from Ukraine.
Nevertheless, because there have been two incidents thus far of Poland detaining Ukrainian journalists who filmed their country’s rail routes with Belarus and Kaliningrad for prolonged periods of time in violation of national security-related legislation, a new infowar narrative is now emerging. The International Federation of Journalists, which is the world’s largest such organization, accused Poland of “persistent obstruction of the work of Ukrainian journalists”.
According to them, this “poses serious threats to the safety of journalists and the press freedom itself”, hence why they’re pressuring Poland to stop enforcing the law and to “cancel the deportation” of the two Ukrainians who were banned from the Schengen zone for filming near Kaliningrad. Ukraine has been desperately trying to discredit the grassroots farmers protests with innuendo of Russian meddling and agricultural influence, and now it’s concocting an “anti-free press” dimension after those efforts failed.
The purpose is to smear Poland’s reputation in the eyes of its Western allies by falsely framing it as a Russian-infiltrated society whose government is so corrupted by Moscow’s agricultural influence that it’s now cracking down on foreign “investigative reporting” to cover up this allegedly dark truth. As was earlier mentioned, not a single protester has been arrested on espionage charges and Poland’s Russian grain imports pale in comparison to its Ukrainian ones, so there’s no basis to what Ukraine is implying.
Furthermore, Ukraine’s own national security-related legislation restricting freedom of the press is incomparably more severe than Poland’s, which makes its latest infowar narrative all the more hypocritical. This emerging trend of Ukraine smearing Poland’s reputation is very unfriendly, proves Kiev’s ingratitude to Warsaw despite all that it’s done to support the regime, and is expected to provoke even more anti-Ukrainian sentiment among Poles as they increasingly become aware of this campaign.
The European Council on Foreign Relations’ poll from January already showed that a whopping 40% of them regard Ukrainians as a threat, which could surpass well over half the population by the next time another survey is conducted if Kiev’s infowar narratives break through the Western mainstream. Unless Ukraine backs off, then Mikhail Podolyak’s prediction last summer of them becoming competitors after their proxy war on Russia ends might prematurely unfold with unpredictable geopolitical consequences.
