“This was a hybrid operation intended to provoke a specific reaction during the holiday period, perhaps also, in some sense, to frighten Poles and to test our services at that time. To see how Poland reacts during the holidays. It was probably another test of the resilience of our state and its readiness to carry out basic tasks in the field of security and defense. The authorities are talking nonsense here because, quite simply, they were unable to deal with this problem,” Andrzej Duda, former President of the Republic of Poland, commented on TV Republika regarding the incursion of 60 balloons from Belarus into Poland.
On Christmas Eve night, objects that had flown in from Belarus appeared over Poland. TV Republika was the first to report the matter.
According to a military communiqué, these were most likely “balloons used for smuggling,” drifting in accordance with the wind direction. So far, the services have managed to locate only 17 of the approximately 60 detected objects.
On December 25, the Minister of National Defense, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, addressed the matter in a terse statement, writing that allegedly “all provocations, both over the Baltic Sea and along the border with Belarus, were fully under control.” Other prominent members of the government – including the Prime Minister, Donald Tusk – have still not spoken out on the issue.
Andrzej Duda on TV Republika: Another stage of a hybrid attack
The guest of editor-in-chief Tomasz Sakiewicz on Political Coffee was the former President of Poland, Andrzej Duda. Asked about the unprecedented attack on Polish security from Belarus, he said:
“Perhaps I will return to the comment I made immediately after that drone attack on Poland, which took place during the Russian-Belarusian Zapad exercises. At the time, I said that I had a concern whether that drone attack was not suddenly the beginning of a new phase of the hybrid attack that has been conducted against Poland from Belarus since 2021, from late summer. That was when the Belarusian regime began pushing migrants toward our border. We all remember that beginning, just before Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”
As he added:
“Today we have no doubts that this was a test to which Poland was subjected. Poland, as a country that has the borders of the European Union, guards that border, guards the border of the Schengen area, but is also a country of the North Atlantic Alliance. At the time of the Zapad maneuvers, I had this concern this year as well – whether this was precisely the beginning of a new phase of this hybrid attack. Whether we would now be dealing systematically, unfortunately, with various kinds of drones entering our airspace… I think that, in some sense, unfortunately, this is the case.”
„This is another stage of that hybrid attack. At present, these are aerial attacks. Their task is to disrupt life in Poland. Lithuania experiences this practically all the time. In Vilnius, at the airport, alarms go off repeatedly and flights are canceled. And Lithuania is smaller, so this is a problem for air traffic, especially since Vilnius is close to the Lithuanian-Belarusian border, so each such object poses a potential threat. This is the disruption of daily life and the disruption of the functioning of the state when it comes to its security systems. And that is what it is all about; that is what a hybrid attack consists of. It is meant to disturb normal functioning and to interfere with the organization of various processes, including economic ones. It is about undermining peace, discouraging investors, and worsening the economic situation. That is the idea behind it,” Duda explained.
The former president then reflected on “how to respond to this.”
“How do you respond to balloons, supposedly meteorological ones? What they are called does not matter. It is obvious that 60 smuggling balloons did not suddenly enter Polish airspace,” he said on TV Republika.
Duda on the authorities’ response: Nonsense!
Editor-in-chief Sakiewicz drew attention to the scant and non-specific response from the Polish authorities. As he added, only a suggestion is being circulated that these were smuggling balloons; yet with such a number of objects, it is hard to believe.
In the former president’s view:
“This is nonsense if one tries to suggest that it was not an operation that was coordinated, controlled, or even carried out by the Belarusian services, at least with the Kremlin’s approval or with Russia’s participation. That is clear… if it was not a Russian operation outright!”
„As to the fact that this was an operation carried out by organized state entities and services, there is no doubt whatsoever. Such a situation has never occurred before, and it is hard to imagine that smugglers, supposedly out of a mere desire to smuggle, during the Christmas holidays, would release 60 balloons at one moment. That is absurd. This was a hybrid operation intended to provoke a specific reaction during the holiday period, perhaps also, in some sense, to frighten Poles and to test our services at that time. To check how Poland reacts during the holidays, when vigilance is theoretically lower. It was probably another test of the resilience of our state and its readiness to carry out basic tasks in the field of security and defense,” he continued.
He went on to point out that:
“The authorities are talking nonsense here because, quite simply, they were unable to deal with this problem, because it is, in general, a very difficult problem. Everyone knows that we do not really have anti-drone defenses in Poland, nor do we have effective and relatively inexpensive defenses against this type of object entering our airspace. This was also once a problem for the United States, when Chinese balloons entered American airspace several times.”