Meanwhile in Absurdistan: Poland has lost the cognitive war with Russia

31. 8. 2026 / Tomasz Oryński

 
The thing that drew my attention the most is the radical change in the attitude towards Ukrainians. On the surface this is nothing new – if you look on the internet, the anti-Ukrainian narration was present on the net for years. While about a year or so ago researchers found that about 80% of anti-Ukrainian posts on the internet are artificial, written by either bots or people paid by Russia, this was a situation when they were extremely active. My own experience seems to corroborate that: when I published a pro-Ukrainian piece that went viral, I decided to look myself, checking every account that posted some aggressive, vulgar or hurtful comment under my post. Most of the accounts were obviously fake, but there was about 20% share of genuine people, of which about half were right-wingers, and the other half comprised of illiterates and confused elderly people. However,  proper research shows that on average only about a half of anti-Ukrainian content is generated by those sources, the rest is genuine.

We can wonder how many of those people are victims of Russian misinformation, but there is a bigger worry: the hate is now leaking into the real world. In that field, Poland has lost the cognitive war with Russia. Nearly every day there are new reports about Ukrainians being harassed or attacked in Poland. I have a plush cat in Ukrainian colours behind the windscreen of my truck – a gift I received from Ukrainian activists after one of my deliveries – and I was a victim of hateful comments myself because of that. The things got out of hand so badly, that I have recently met a young boy in Ukraine who spoke Polish as he hoped to move to our country, but now he changed his mind. It really made me sad.

Of course many politicians are trying to jump on the bandwagon – and those are not only radical, often openly pro-Russian politicians from the right like Grzegorz Braun, but also from the mainstream parties like Donald Tusk’ Koalicja Obywatelska. But not all is lost yet: after local councillors in Kielce blocked transfer of buses that were removed from service to the Kielce’s partner city Vynnitsa, a crowdfunding action raised the amount required to purchase those buses in less than a week.

As those who remember my previous chapters might remember, Donald Tusk’s government turns out to be a great disappointment on many fronts. They seem to be unable to undertake any bold action themselves, and they are instead reacting to attacks from the opposition and scandals caused by their own party colleagues: just recently the two biggest scandals were a party member who took advantage of the failures of the Polish health service to make a fortune as a doctor offering services to hospital on B2B basis and a special path that allowed friends and family of the ruling party politicians to skip the queue in order to receive medical care. And right now the whole Polish internet is full of memes mocking Barbara Mróz-Gorgoń, one of Donald Tusk’s secretaries responsible for promotion of Poland who lost her job due to  AI. But don’t worry, it’s not that robots took her job. She simply didn’t want to be bothered to do it, so she created a ridiculously bad project for the  promotion of Poland, which was basically pages and pages of extremally bad AI slop, in which in broken Polish sprinkled with random English words one could learn things like that the city of Katowice lies in the Northern Centre of Poland.

This material was apparently created at the cost of 200 000 zl. Mróz-Gorgoń denies all accusations, saying that this was work in progress, that no public money was spent on it and that she has to leave her job due to enormous amount of hate (apparently she is unaware of existence of valid criticism). But maybe sheleft too quickly?  Surely SOME promotional aims have been achieved? Last time I heard so much about Poland in the foreign media when the chief of police by mistake exploded a grenade in his office.

Some critics point out that Mróz-Gorgoń is just a symptom of a bigger problem: she was known before for being a prominent person of corporate liberalism, known for her passionate – but ultimately void of any meaning – speeches in which she used a mix of corporate Polish-English language and neoliberal ideas. This government seems to be siding with this world, rather than with ordinary Poles, which can be visible in many of their actions – from protecting businesses’ interests at the expense of the worker’s rights I wrote about this before) to, more recently, dropping the bill that was supposed to regulate occasional rentals such as AirBnB, which not only pumps up the already record high prices of rental housing  but also makes lives of people who happen to share the close which includes rental flats a literal hell, as those seem to be extremely popular amongst British tourists who still regularly come to Poland for the cheap booze.

Some changes are being made when it comes to road safety – apparently it will no longer be possible to drive a car while having several driving bans only to then receive yet another one in the court – which is nothing unusual in Poland. But while we have regular instances of speeding drivers killing people (just recently a young man driving a Volkswagen Golf tuned to over 400hp lost control in Kraków while driving more than twice as fast as the speed limit and killed two parents also injuring  an 8 months old baby they had in their pram. This case has forced the govenrment to make some hasty changes (which usually end up in “Tusk being angry” and “ordering his ministers that something should be done”, some strong promises and then everything gets lost over the months of work in progress to end up with some small changes to the law). the fact is that the problem needs to be tackled from the bottom. 

The activity of the pro-pedestrian activists such as Konfitura or Samochodoza – who for years were publishing regular clips in which they confront drivers who park illegally or drive on the pavements – becomes extremely popular and gains widespread support, even despite the fact that media try to portray them as provocateurs. And yet, as everyone who has ever tried to report a wrongly parked car in Poland can attest, the police and municipal guard would have to work five times as hard. At the moment they avoid having to fine the driver and make the reporting person’s life miserable so they think twice before reporting such a thing again.

But while work of the uniformed services indeed leaves a lot to be desired, the real problem is that Polish  law is formulated  in such a way that it actually promotes illegal parking. As Szymon Nieradka from an activist group Agenda Parkingowa explains (amogst other places, in my podcast), if you park legally in the controlled parking zone, you will receive a hefty fine everytime the control vehicle passes you and finds that you haven’t paid for your parking. But just park on the pavement, grass, bus stop or a pedestrian crossing, and you can be fined 150 zlotys or so (the fine that has not been raised for about a quarter of a century) and then you can park there forever, as you can’t be fined for the same offence twice. That means it’s sometimes cheaper to park illegally, especially that a chance to receive a parking ticket is extremely slim – even if police reacts, most likely you will just get a verbal warning. Szymon Nieradka proved his point by parking an old Škoda in the most prominent pedestrian zone in the middle of Warsaw – after receiving a  100 zł fine, he laminated it and put behind the windscreen – and from there on, the car could stay there forever. It could not even be towed, as towing is only allowed if the vehicle is obstructing the traffic, and as many videos from Konfitura or Samochodoza shows, for the police officers its only possible to obstruct vehicular traffic. It’s easier to win a lotto than to witness a car being towed because it has been blocking the pavement.

Society is polarized – while most Poles are annoyed with cars being parked everywhere, some people support the drivers with usual arguments of “there is nowhere to park” (also debunked by Szymon Nieradka, who monitors the situation around the newly built – at a great cost – multistorey parking in Szczecin to show that people would rather park illegally across the entrance to it than drive inside and park there for a very affordable price. This division has been already spotted and many groups on Facebook – such as “głos kierowców”, the voice of drivers – are being created and gain popularity. Judging from the previous activity of the many prominent accounts there it is yet another front where Russian propaganda is going to sew division, just after anti-Ukrainian sentiments or earlier,  covid and the vaccines. The pro-Russian politician Grzegorz Braun seems to already have been sent a memo, as while I am writing those words, a clip of him in which he calls speed cameras “yet another attack on the Polish freedom by the Euro-soyuz”. So, watch this space.

But closer to the current political spectrum we have a saga of PiS ministers who ran away to Orban’s Hungary. After Orban lost power, ex justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro has found himself in the US, where he flew on a passport issued to him by Hungary – as his Polish one has been invalidated. Some sources report it was even a diplomatic one, which would be a very unusual way to arrive for a reporter (as, probably because Ziobro has no means to make money, pro-PiS TV Republika (comprising mostly of their propagandists who escaped there after losing control over our national broadcaster) employed him as their American correspondent.

Meanwhile Ziobro’s right hand, Marcin Romanowski – also wanted for his part in the same embezzling scheme – wasn’t so lucky and instead of have an  American dream he is suspected to be hiding  in Transrnistria – a Russian controlled region of Moldova.

It’s funny how all people related to Ziobro – because we also have to remember Marcin Szmydt, who got a refugee status in Belarus – end up running away to Russia-aligned countries, eh?

But of course Ziobro’s embezzlement of the money from the Justice Fund – that was supposed to support victims of crime – is not the only criminal scandal that PiS has been involved with. The newest chapter is the Zonda Crypto saga. Zonda Crypto was one of the biggest exxhange platforms for cryptocurrencies in Europe, and its original CEO, Sylwester Suszek has been missing since 2022 (presumed murdered). He was most likely just a face and the real business was conducted by the mafia and people with connections to Russia. After Sylwester Suszek went missing, the head lawyer for the company took over and become very cosy with PiS politicians, sponsoring their fundations and pro-PiS media such as TV Republika or (the not so openly pro-PiS) Kanał Zero ran by the former presidential candidate Krzystof Stanowski. Recently the exchange got bankrupt and lot of people lost their savings, while the acting CEO got himself Israeli citizenship and ran away  there, so his extradition is impossible. But the newest development is that he’s willing to come back to Poland to take part in a witness protection scheme, which has caused panic amonsgst the PiS politicians, many of whom received very generous “gifts” from his company.

PiS politicians are now trying to spin this and frame Donald Tusk as a person responsible for the fact  that many Poles lost their savings, but the fact is that government was trying to put cryptocurrency exchanges under the scope of the financial ombudsman and this law was twice vetoed by president Nawrocki, which was welcomed by Konfederacja and PiS itself.

But there is also one unexpected thing: Poles are cheering for a bíllionaire. Rafał Brzoska, the boss of the courier network InPost got fed up with a scam advertisment on Facebook that uses his likeness in AI generated movies encouraging people to invest in some shady businesses and hew has been trying to tackle Meta. He begunby naming Polish METa executives and accussed them of being responsible for this– to which Meta reacted by accusing him of “doxxing” them, which allegedly is a treat to their safety.

But as everyone else also would like the tech corporations to show some more responsibility, Poles has sided  with Brzoska. But there is also a twist: he is particularly annoyed by the fact that Meta denies all responsibility, that there is no responsible person, that they hide behind a network of companies in some other countries blaming subcontractors and so on – and this is also something Poles are looking closely at. Because Rafał Brzoska’s business model is based on thousands of couriers who are ignoring the parking requirement and breaking the traffic rules to meet their targets, but when the report is made to InPost, they usually hide behind “It’s not our van, it’s an  independent contractor” while at the same time registering their companies in a tax haven, allegedly in order to avoid paying taxes. And Poles are looking closely at this, curious if Brzoska will see the irony or not – he has just bumped into someone who conducts business in his style, and is just bigger than him. 

Personally, I don’t expect any changes to the InPost business model. Or to Meta’s, for that matter. Actually, sadly, from the aforementioned events that are taking place in Poland, the Russian meddling is the only one when I can predict some significant outcome. And not a good one for that. Let’s just hope that I am wrong this time.