Cybersecurity and disinformation experts in Poland choose their words carefully when they speak of a state of war. The war waged by Russia and Belarus against the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization began in 2014 with the invasion of Crimea and the Donbas. The conflict, with its own history and distinct phases, escalated during the night of September 10 to 11, when around 20 Russian drones violated Polish airspace. NATO, for the first time since its founding in 1949, was forced to open fire on enemy flying objects in European airspace.
That night, the Polish internet exploded. Many experts described it as a tsunami of disinformation. "Over the course of that night, we analyzed around 200,000 mentions [statuses, messages, comments] spreading the Russian narrative, or 200 to 300 mentions per minute," said Michal Fedorowicz, president of the Res Futura collective, which specializes in the analysis of social media and its impact on public opinion. "In terms of scale, it's the equivalent of what happens during an election night for a presidential vote."
But all these mentions carried very carefully crafted messages. According to these posts, the attack was a Ukrainian provocation, meant to drag Poles into a war that was not theirs and NATO into a third world war. In the same narrative, the Polish military and NATO were described as ineffective and powerless despite their considerable resources. And above all, the Polish and transatlantic authorities were accused of covering up the truth about these events.
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"Within just a few hours, the enemy managed to saturate the algorithms of our social media and modify their parameters to its advantage," Fedorowicz explained.
The result: When Polish citizens woke up and checked their smartphones, they were very likely to find a digital environment awash with falsehoods. The impact was measurable. Of all the comments analyzed by Res Futura, 38% blamed Ukrainians for the incident, 34% blamed Russians and a significant share blamed NATO.
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"Not all the messages promoted by Russian propaganda are strictly false, but they can be exaggerated for harmful purposes," noted Filip Glowacz, an expert on the external threat analysis team at NASK. "For example, the claim that the Belarusian authorities warned the Poles about the imminent arrival of drones. That's true, even if the military agrees that the Belarusians did not act in good faith. The subliminal message is clear: The Belarusians are kind, the Polish military is lying to you, the Poles are wrong to close their borders." These attacks continued, with varying degrees of intensity, throughout the month of September.
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"Discrediting Ukrainian immigrants, Ukrainian refugees and the Ukrainian government has been the number one message of Russian propaganda for three years, in Poland as well as the rest of Europe," Fedorowicz continued. "The goal is to erode public support, and therefore political support, for the war effort." This strategy has only met with partial success. While anti-Ukrainian sentiment has soared in some countries, including Poland โ surfacing even in the rhetoric of the moderate political class โ it has not translated into actual political decisions. Across Europe, the front supporting aid to Ukraine remains united, and no one is questioning the need to increase defense spending.
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The night of September 10 to 11, which exposed certain weaknesses in the Alliance's anti-drone defense, also marks a turning point toward a new phase of this information war, with a new dominant message for the European public. "Now, citizens must question the effectiveness and usefulness of NATO," Fedorowicz noted. "The strategic goal is to sow doubt about the reliability of the Alliance, so that citizens start to question the need to increase military budgets."
Faced with hundreds of thousands of fake accounts flooding social media with these messages, regulators, for their part, feel powerless. "We collaborate with companies like Facebook, X [formerly Twitter] or TikTok," said Filip Glowacz. "But despite our requests, it is very difficult to get them to remove anything. Doing so would impact their business model. We have no coercive instruments to fight the armies of bots from the East. That's what makes this war so asymmetrical."