Polish President Karol Nawrocki in an interview with the daily Rzeczpospolita accused Prime Minister Donald Tusk of inventing a CIA report in order to threaten Poland with a Russian attack and garner political capital.
Polish President Karol Nawrocki in an interview with the daily Rzeczpospolita published on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Donald Tusk of using a CIA report that he himself had invented in order to scare Poles with warnings of a Russian attack and cash in politically. His comments have placed Poland in a very difficult situation with its allies, Nawrocki said. “When I’m meeting partners from around the world, I hear the question directly: do you know something more than we do. That is a very dangerous situation,” he added.
Nawrocki said the main aim of such messages is a so-called “rally-around-the-flag effect,” in which citizens who fear an enemy back whoever is in power. He stressed that he has just as much information as Prime Minister Tusk has, and possibly even more. He also underscored that the level of the threat from Russia has not changed in the last six months. “The only thing that has changed is that one politician persistently uses this threat for his own political gain,” said the head of state.
This dispute over Tusk’s CIA report dates back to the beginning of September. After a meeting of the leaders of the Visegrad Group in Bratislava the Prime Minister declared that he had received “a fairly precise report directly from the head of the CIA” on possible events in the next few months. According to the report there could be provocations at border crossings and also attempts at sabotage from within. In response, Marcin Przydacz, head of the president’s international policy office, wrote on X that there was no secret CIA report on any desk. He called it an invented lie meant to get the public worked up, and said none of the news channels that ran it for two days ever checked the facts.
So, this is what is left of the so-called proof. National Security Bureau chief Bartosz Grodecki said that Tomasz Siemoniak, the minister coordinating the special services, was his source for information that he in turn shared with President Nawrocki. Wirtualna Polska concluded that the verbal readout of the conversation with CIA Director John Ratcliffe was all there was, and that no document ever reached the president’s desk. Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki stressed that there was no lie and no exaggeration on the part of the prime minister. After the interview, Prime Minister Tusk wrote on X that Nawrocki does not see a growing Russian threat, and thanked him for his honesty.
