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Russian Soft Power in Poland the Kremlin and Pro-Russian Organizations Łukasz Wenerski Michal Kacewicz Russian soft power in Poland The Kremlin and pro-Russian organizations Edited by Lóránt Győri April, 2017 A study by Political Capital Russian soft power in Poland - The Kremlin and pro-Russian organizations Commissioned by Political Capital Budapest 2017 Authors: Lukasz Wenerski (Institute of Public Affairs), Michal Kacewicz (Newsweek.pl) Editor: Lóránt Győri (Political Capital) Peer review: Wojciech Przybylski (Visegrad Insight, Res Publica) Publisher: Political Capital Copy editing: Mátyás Földvári, Veszna Wessenauer (Political Capital) Proofreading: Patrik Szicherle (Political Capital), Joseph Foss Facebook data scraping and quantitative analysis: Csaba Molnár (Political Capital) This publication and research was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. 2 CONTENTS Contents ........................................................................................................................................................... 3 Foreword .......................................................................................................................................................... 5 Methodology .................................................................................................................................................... 7 Main findings .................................................................................................................................................. 9 Policy recommendations ............................................................................................................................. 11 Sectoral recommendations ...................................................................................................................... 11 Polish-Russian Relations in a historical perspective ................................................................................ 13 Diplomatic Relations after Crimea’s Annexation ..................................................................................... 15 Effects of the Sanctions and Economic-Energy Dependency ................................................................. 16 Public Attitudes and the perception of Russia-EU-US Relations ........................................................... 18 Security Considerations towards Russia .................................................................................................... 19 General rules of Russian soft power in Poland ......................................................................................... 21 Polish-Ukrainian relations ....................................................................................................................... 22 NATO ......................................................................................................................................................... 24 Western liberalism .................................................................................................................................... 25 Polish-German relations .......................................................................................................................... 25 Pro-Russian political actors ......................................................................................................................... 27 Zmiana and Mateusz Piskorski ............................................................................................................... 27 Kukiz’15 ..................................................................................................................................................... 30 Janusz Korwin-Mikke............................................................................................................................... 31 Other Pro-Russian organizations and extremists, paramilitary movements vulnerable to Russian influence ......................................................................................................................................................... 33 ECAG.......................................................................................................................................................... 33 Communist Youth of Poland .................................................................................................................. 34 Nationalism in a historical perspective .................................................................................................. 35 National Rebirth of Poland – NOP ......................................................................................................... 36 National Radical Camp ............................................................................................................................ 36 National Movement .................................................................................................................................. 37 Falanga ....................................................................................................................................................... 38 Camp of Great Poland .............................................................................................................................. 39 3 Vulnerability of the “Territorial Defence” approach ............................................................................ 41 Lone wolves ................................................................................................................................................... 42 Tomasz Maciejczuk .................................................................................................................................. 42 Marcin Skalski ........................................................................................................................................... 42 Mechanisms to influence fringe movements in Poland ........................................................................... 43 Media Analysis .............................................................................................................................................. 44 Pro-Russian influence in the media ........................................................................................................ 44 Fringe media mechanism ......................................................................................................................... 44 Mainstream media influenced by trolls.................................................................................................. 44 Pro-Russian sites ....................................................................................................................................... 46 Pro-Russian Facebook pages ....................................................................................................................... 49 Summary .................................................................................................................................................... 49 General statistics ....................................................................................................................................... 50 Page activity ............................................................................................................................................... 51 Issues and narratives ................................................................................................................................. 54 4 FOREWORD This paper is the summary of the results of a one-year long research project covering five countries and exploring the connections between a wide range of pro-Kremlin stakeholders and Central- Eastern European countries’ political forces in general and the violent, fringe extreme-right movements in particular. Political Capital has already published Europe-wide researches 1 and country-specific case studies on the connections between (far-right) political players in Slovakia2 and Hungary,3 and published a report on the „export” of ultraconservative, illiberal values by pro-Kremlin players to Central-Eastern Europe. 4 Others have done important research on this topic as well. 5 However, this is the first research project that focuses mainly on the violent ramifications of the strategy of the Russian state and its proxies to support fringe, extremist organizations in order to undermine bilateral ties with Ukraine and the United States, and destabilize the region. The five countries that we are focusing on are Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Most of our findings are indicative of the trends in the broader region. The war in Eastern Ukraine and the migration crisis have acted as a catalyst to not only re-legitimize these extremist organizations’ sine qua non for paramilitary activities, but to pit against each other organisations harbouring ancient chauvinistic and revisionist historical sentiments between their respective Central-Eastern European. The Kremlin’s aim is undeniable as part of this process. Through reaching out to or supporting paramilitary organisations, it successfully destabilizes Ukraine and the surrounding European region to keep Ukraine’s legitimacy, territorial sovereignty, minority issues in constant limbo. 1 Szabados,Krisztián, Krekó, Péter: Russia’s far-right friends. Riskandforecast.com http://www.riskandforecast.com/post/in-depth-analysis/russia-s-far-right-friends_349.html Political Capital Institute. The Russian connection. The spread of pro-Russian policies
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