Russia is already waging war on Poland, and Nato must respond more forcefully to its next attack, a senior Polish general has said.
Poland shot down Russian drones deep inside its airspace last autumn, while Moscow-linked hackers have attacked government infrastructure and ministries of thousands of times — including a cyber-assault that sought to cripple the power grid in midwinter.
The Polish border guard has discovered a tunnel beneath the Poland-Belarus frontier, with officials confirming that more than 180 migrants entered Poland on Thursday, December 11th, through the underground passage. The tunnel, located near the village of Narewka in the northeastern region, is the fourth such structure detected along the border in 2025. Authorities report that over 130 people have been detained so far, while searches for the remaining migrants continue.
Two thirds of Canadians support sending our troops to countries such as Poland if Russia invades, according to a new Postmedia-Leger poll.
“You’d like to think that this is really kind of a super hypothetical pie-in-the-sky kind of question. But unfortunately, crazy things are happening all around the world,” Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive vice-president for Central Canada, said Thursday.
Thanks to the norms of inter-state combat which have governed much of history, we’ve long been conditioned to think of war and peace in binary terms. But what’s happening on Nato’s east shows us that it is in fact a spectrum, with Poland caught right in the grey zone at its midpoint.
This weekend, for the first time since the Second World War, a deliberate explosion damaged a railway line connecting Warsaw to Lublin in what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage”. Although Polish authorities have not yet named a specific culprit, they’re already stating the obvious — that “all traces lead to Russia.” That’s hardly surprising, given that the damaged rail line serves as a key pathway for shipping aid to Ukraine, and Russia has sent recruits to gather intelligence on Polish rail hubs near military bases and to disrupt train services using radio networks in the recent past.
Assuming it was Russia.
Poland: Ukrainians Working for Moscow Responsible for Railway Explosion
A rail line in Poland was blown up Sunday in “an unprecedented act of sabotage,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Monday, vowing to “catch the perpetrators.”
The affected line links Warsaw, the capital, to the eastern Polish city of Lublin and continues onward to Ukraine, and it has been used to deliver aid to Ukraine. Without specifically accusing Russia, Tusk connected the apparent attack to the war in Ukraine.
“Blowing up the rail track on the Warsaw-Lublin route is an unprecedented act of sabotage targeting directly the security of the Polish state and its civilians,” Tusk wrote Monday on X. “This route is also crucially important for delivering aid to Ukraine. We will catch the perpetrators, whoever they are.”
Poland is the only European nation to never have an Islamist terror attack.
It's because they have a border. pic.twitter.com/X8GgyOcpX2
— Inevitable West (@Inevitablewest) October 12, 2025
Poland said Wednesday it had scrambled aircraft alongside allies to shoot down “hostile objects” violating its airspace during a Russian attack on neighboring Ukraine, a first for a NATO country during the war.
“Aircraft have used weapons against hostile objects,” Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said on social media, adding: “We are in constant contact with NATO command.”
The incursion came as Russia unleashed a barrage of strikes across Ukraine, including in the western city of Lviv, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Polish border.
There was a particularly striking moment last week in Warsaw as Prime Minister Mark Carney renewed his friendship with Poland’s Donald Tusk, a flash that subtly captured the stark choices Canada will likely face in the not-too-distant future.
Carney was genuine in his praise of the eastern European country’s wholehearted, enthusiastic embrace of NATO and the Western alliance’s defence spending targets.
“We learn much from the prime minister, from his government, including the importance of pulling our full weight in NATO,” Carney said.
How to catch up? We can ask Poland to annex us!
WARSAW – Prime Minister Mark Carney is striking a new strategic partnership with Poland that will see Canada deepen its ties in trade, defence and energy with the fast-growing European economy.
Carney is in Warsaw today where he is meeting with his Polish counterpart, Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The pair say they’ve agreed to work more closely in areas such as defence, aviation, cybersecurity and clean energy.
Expecting a border incident?
From Swinoujscie on the Baltic coast to Zgorzelec in Silesia, the yellow-vested activists turned out in their hundreds at a dozen border crossings between Poland and Germany.
They peered into car windows for evidence of illicit migrants, conducted periodic “citizen’s arrests” and on at least one occasion flew a drone over German border guards.
With Germany now routinely turning back asylum seekers at the border, the message from the vigilante patrols was frank and uncompromising: if the Polish state would not protect its side of the border, then the Polish people would do it themselves.
Poland: “Refugees not welcomed”
Massive protest.
About 80-100 cities all over Poland are put aside any Footbal rivalries & stand together against illegal immigration.
“This is Poland, not Brussels, here we don’t support immigration” pic.twitter.com/SEM0Uj65i2
— Lenka White (@white_lenka) July 20, 2025
Antifa showed up with cardboard with pro-immigration slogans on anti-immigration protests.@WyrzykowskiPS decided that he would not tolerate leftists who want to bring danger to Poles, Polish women and children.
Bravo for @WyrzykowskiPS pic.twitter.com/l70f2TFvAj
— Based Poland (@Poland_Based) July 20, 2025
Anti‑immigration protests have taken place in dozens of towns and cities across Poland.
Most demonstrations attracted several hundred people or fewer on Saturday – but police estimated that about 3,000 took part in the largest rally in the southern city of Katowice.
The protests were organised by far-right political group Konfederacja, and another nationalist organisation.
Poland’s recent presidential election is now at risk of being overturned after the conservative candidate, Karol Nawrocki, won a surprise victory against the liberal favorite. Backed by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, Nawrocki defeated the liberal Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski, a close ally of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Brussels-aligned coalition.
But instead of acceptance, Nawrocki’s win has triggered a wave of resistance. Unlike in other EU countries—where electoral irregularities are tolerated if the “correct” candidates win—Poland now faces the prospect of having the vote annulled altogether. The Supreme Court has announced that it will issue a verdict on the election’s validity on July 1 after receiving more than 50,000 complaints.
Far-right leaders in Europe have welcomed the victory of the nationalist opposition candidate, Karol Nawrocki, in Poland’s presidential elections, a result that deals a huge blow to the centre-right prime minister Donald Tusk’s reform and pro-EU agenda.
Nawrocki, a conservative historian and former amateur boxer, won Sunday’s election with 50.89% of the vote, final figures showed on Monday, ahead of his rival, Rafał Trzaskowski, the liberal Warsaw mayor and an ally of Tusk, who secured 49.11%.
“Congratulations to President @NawrockiKn on his fantastic victory,” Hungary’s illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orbán, posted on social media, adding that he was “looking forward to working” with the 42-year-old, who has never held elected office.
Oh no! It’s those scary far-right leaders again!
Visitors to Western Europe have grown accustomed to young male migrants hawking selfie sticks, demanding a few euros, or — most often — simply loitering. Cities behind the former Iron Curtain have largely avoided this transformation. In Warsaw and other Polish cities, slowly but perceptibly, it is occurring in real time.
On a recent day in Warsaw, a young African man hassled and blocked the paths of pedestrians crossing ulica Emilii Plater, in the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, Stalin’s infamous gift to the Polish people. “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries,” once asserted the Soviet dictator. “We must make good this distance in ten years.”
Poland has been forced to let go of its history
Since its inception, the European project has always aimed to bring about the end of history on the continent, and to finally put the ceaseless cycle of war, extremism and imperialism that had torn Europe apart for a thousand years to rest.
Yet history’s severed heads have a troublesome habit of growing back. The Russian invasion of Ukraine served as a powerful reminder of this reality for the European mainstream, but other unresolved threads of the continent’s brutal and very recent past have also re-emerged in much more subtle ways.
Poland’s military affairs department is investigating the death of a soldier who was stabbed while protecting his country’s border. Meanwhile, the foreign ministry has summoned the Belarusian envoy in Warsaw to discuss the case.
The incident took place last week, on May 28th, and the soldier has since died of his injuries.
