Poland has launched a “special operation” involving counterterrorism police, intelligence officers and beefed-up border security on its northern frontier with Russia, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday, calling it a response to “disturbing movement” that could be preparation for “armed incursions.” Mr. Tusk, speaking in Warsaw, said the late-night movement just across the border in Kaliningrad — a Russian region sandwiched between Poland, the Baltic Sea and Lithuania — involved unidentified people carrying flashlights, whose intentions were not clear. He said Poland had received warnings from allied intelligence services of possible “acts of sabotage or more serious provocations on the border with the Russian Federation.” Mr. Tusk added that “more precise information,” received recently, indicated that “events could occur in the first half of November, including armed incursions” into Polish territory.
“It’s not a coincidence that this tension, provoked by the Russians, is occurring today,” Mr. Tusk said, citing “global uncertainty and confusion” over the midterm elections in the United States and a “sense of conflict and instability” in Poland because of a bitter political dispute over its constitutional court. European governments have been frazzled in recent months by a spate of sabotage operations that officials have blamed on Russia, including a failed drone attack on a German airport. There have also been warnings, citing intelligence reports, that Russia could be planning some kind of military incursion or provocation along NATO’s eastern flank.
An airport outside of Warsaw shut down briefly on Tuesday after a bomb threat was directed at a flight from London, one of two Warsaw-bound flights that were targeted in what appeared to be hoax threats. Several other flights in Europe were also subjected to bomb threats. All landed safely, and the threats were being investigated.
Some of Mr. Tusk’s political opponents accused him of using border tensions to distract attention from an effort by government-backed judges on the Constitutional Tribunal to unseat its chief justice, a supporter of Poland’s former right-wing governing party, Law and Justice. Mr. Tusk’s government sent riot police to seal off the court on Friday. President Karol Nawrocki, a foe of Mr. Tusk and a vocal supporter of the chief justice, barely mentioned Russia at a National Security Council meeting held on Tuesday to discuss defense issues, focusing instead on the standoff at the Constitutional Tribunal. While stating that “the aggressor,” a reference to Russia, “must be effectively deterred” even as it “operates below the threshold of war,” Mr. Nawrocki vowed to resist changes at the court and “stop this attempt to overturn the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland.”
Kaliningrad, formerly German land that was annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, is Russia’s westernmost territory. As the headquarters of its Baltic Fleet and a major military garrison, it has long been viewed as a potential launchpad for military action. Poland’s previous right-wing government, facing a tough election in 2023, warned that Russian mercenary fighters were mobilizing to seal off the so-called Suwalki Gap, which stretches from Kaliningrad to Belarus between Poland and Lithuania. Once, closing the gap would have separated the three Baltic States, all members of NATO, from the rest of the military alliance. But Finland’s entry into NATO after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed that. The mercenaries that the government warned about in 2023 never appeared. Far more likely than an armed incursion from Kaliningrad into Poland, according to analysts, are small-scale provocations and sabotage operations aimed at destabilizing Mr. Tusk’s government, which Moscow reviles because of its strong support for Ukraine and the European Union. Disorder on the frontier, according to this theory, could help turn Polish opinion against Ukraine and boost ...
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