What is the connection between the current head of the Military Counterintelligence Service Jarosław Stróżyk and the Russian rector-putinist and the pro-Soviet WSI colonel in charge of the University of Siedlce, whose university closely cooperates with Russia and Belarus? If Russian and Belorussian influence was indeed being fought in Tusk’s Poland, the Polish state’s knowledge of the University of Siedlce would make it impossible to appoint Stróżyk both as head of the Military Counterintelligence Service and as chairman of the Government Commission investigating alleged Russian and Belorussian influence.
When Brigadier General (res.) Jarosław Stróżyk became the chair of the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) in December 2023 and began pretending to be an apolitical soldier of the Polish Army after years of political involvement… he reportedly asked whether the Polish special services – including the SKW – had taken any interest in the University of Siedlce in the past. He was said to have demanded specific knowledge and documents, presumably hoping to learn counterintelligence knowledge about the university through the fact of association of many former military, special services officers and even active-duty soldiers and officers with the University of Siedlce.
His friends later told us that this involved some anxiety on Stróżyk’s part, which was generally explained by the quality of his doctoral thesis (‘Contemporary International Intelligence Cooperation’), which he defended on 13 February 2019 at the Institute of Security Sciences at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Siedlce under the guidance of his good friend from the Military Information Services, Prof. Col. Mirosław Minkina, interestingly now rector of the University of Siedlce (since 2020).
We are familiar with Stróżyk’s doctoral thesis, his low academic level has, by the way, already become a legend (more on that shortly), but we are sure that this is not what the current head of the SKW, and at the same time the chairman of the Government Commission on Russian and Belarusian Influences on the Internal Security and Interests of the Republic of Poland, was and is concerned about.
The essence of this concern was and is the University of Siedlce, which for many years – including when Stróżyk was defending his PhD thesis under the guidance of a colleague from the Military Intelligence Service (WSI) – became a serious target of Russian, but also Belarusian, influence.
The whole history of the University of Siedlce’s relations with the Russian Federation (also with the Republic of Belarus), with the Russian Embassy in Poland, with Russian universities and specific Russian scientists, and the circle of people functioning around the university and its security-related projects (often former soldiers of the Polish People’s Army (LWP), Internal Military Service (WSW), Board II and Military Intelligence Service (WSI), as well as functionaries of the communist secret services), should become the subject of a counter-intelligence investigation, an audit of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and special concern of the Government Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influence.
Obviously, due to the conflict of interests related to Stróżyk’s relations with the University of Siedlce (not only the defence of his PhD thesis) and his links with Colonel Minkina (the university’s rector), he should no longer head either the Government Commission or the Internal Security Service.
Today, we can finally confess that it was no coincidence that during the period of the functioning of the State Commission for Investigating Russian Influences on the Internal Security of the Republic of Poland in 2007-2022, we became interested, among others, in the figure of Jarosław Stróżyk, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently publicly informed the public. Siedlce was consequently also on the Commission’s ‘radar’, which, with the help of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) counterintelligence service, would be described in the future.
Besides, if Russian and Belorussian influences were indeed being combated in Tusk’s Poland, the Polish state’s knowledge of the University of Siedlce would have prevented the appointment of Stróżyk as head of the Internal Security Agency and chairman of the Government Commission investigating alleged Russian and Belorussian influences.
Link No. 1 – Col Mirosław Minkina
When presenting Stróżyk’s candidacy for the post of chairman of the Government Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influences on the internal security and interests of the Republic of Poland on 21 May this year, Tusk called his chosen man, among other things, a ‘NATO deputy intelligence officer’ (a lie we write about in the latest “Gazeta Polska” issue), emphasising that he is a ‘scientist’ and a ‘doctor of security science’. However, the Prime Minister did not mention at which university and under whose auspices Stróżyk obtained his PhD in 2019.
And this is a pity… because the father of Stróżyk’s ‘scientific’ career and his colleague from the radio talk shows on special services – Professor Mirosław Minkina – deserves more attention. Minkina is a reserve colonel of the Polish People’s Army/Polish Army (LWP/WP), the son of officers of the Civic Militia, who began his communist career in the People’s Army in 1978, joining the ranks of the Polish Socialist Youth Union (ZSMP) and the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) at the same time (an activist of the ZSMP City Board and secretary of the PZPR Basic Party Organisation), who – as we read in a party opinion from 1985. – ‘pursues the party line with full devotion’.
Minkina began by studying at the General J. Bem Higher School of Rocket and Artillery Forces (1978-1982), but almost as soon as he graduated he became a political instructor and became involved in the party division of the army supervised by the Main Political Board of the LWP. When Jaruzelski imposed martial law, Minkina was already the chairman of the youth organisation in the PZPR, a member of the PZPR University Committee and had ‘predispositions for party-political work in the Armed Forces’. He taught cadets and basic service soldiers, ‘skilfully interpreting class and ideological ties with socialist countries and promoted the need to foster and strengthen the brotherhood of arms with the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries’. Interestingly, when the People’s Republic of Poland was preparing for systemic transformation, Captain Minkina’s superiors (at that time already a student at the Faculty of Pedagogy and the First Secretary of the Basic party organisation (POP) at the F. Dzierżyński Military Political Academy) considered that in the future ‘he was promising to be a very good academic’.
However, before the prospect of the Main Political Board of the LWP came to fruition, Minkina swapped the uniform of a politruk for that of a senior education officer in the Department of Education of the Polish Army, to function for a few years in the Department of Military Foreign Affairs (1993-1995) and, after Poland’s admission to NATO, even land as a major-specialist in the Team of Advisors for the Defence Representation of Poland to NATO and the Western European Union (WEU) (1998-2000).
In this way, the former politruk became a quasi-diplomat of the Polish military to NATO. In keeping with the spirit of the times, in 2002, he even defended his PhD thesis on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation at the National Defence Academy (the reviewer was, inter alia, Gen. Czesław Dęga of the Second Board of the Military Police), whose supervisor was Prof. Jerzy Kunikowski, years later Minkina’s colleague at the University of Siedlce.
From 2000, Col. Dr. Minkina was already serving in the Military Information Services, where his paths crossed with Capt. Jarosław Stróżyk (from 2003 major) in the WSI Studies and Analysis Board. Minkina was deputy and head of the WSI’s Board of Studies and Analysis and Stróżyk’s superior from 2001 to 2006. Upon hearing the news of the liquidation of the WSI, Colonel Miroslaw Minkina fled the army and, in line with the vision of his comrades from the GZP, devoted himself to ‘science’, obtaining his habilitation in 2013 at the friendly National Defence Academy (based on his non-secret dissertation ‘Intelligence in the Modern State’, which was later recommended by General Marek Dukaczewski).
After his habilitation, Minkina landed at the University of Siedlce, where he was, among others, director of the Institute of Social and Security Sciences, head of the Department of International Security and Strategic Studies vice-rector for Science at the University of Natural Sciences and Humanities, and has been rector of the University of Siedlce since 2020. He co-edited (editor-in-chief) from 2014 to 2016 the rather peculiar journal ‘Secretum. Special Services. Security. Information‘, in which consultants and authors of texts included Soviet-trained Colonel Krzysztof Surdyk and General Marek Dukaczewski, SB officer Colonel Włodzimierz Sokołowski (’Vincent Severski’), and the journal’s Scientific Council included representatives of Tambov’s G. Dzierżawin State University (Professor Vladimir Romanov) and M. V. Lomonosov State University (Dr Vladimir Pautov). Today, Minkina sits on the Advisory Board of the National Association for the Protection of Classified Information and the Association for the Support of National Security. These organisations are headed by KGB trainee Colonel Tadeusz Koczkowski, a former officer of the Internal Security Service and the WSI.
Association No. 2 – ‘Russia is already here’ (in Siedlce)
Professor Colonel Miroslaw Minkina is as much symbolic as a key figure in this story. He is crucial in showing the university’s links with Russia and Belarus, but also the characteristic attitude shared by many WSI officers who, after leaving service and achieving a high professional position in the civilian sector (quite unlike in the West), became a transmission belt for counter-intelligence threats. In the case of the University of Siedlce, also Russian and Belarusian. Suffice it to mention that the University of Siedlce has signed as many as 24 agreements with Russian universities, seventeen of which have the status of state universities (cooperation also includes universities with which no cooperation agreements have been signed), which in the system of the state ruled by Putin’s ‘St Petersburg group’ play an important role in building the regime’s social base. In contrast, among the seven agreements with Belarusian universities, five relate to state schools.
Among the Russian universities with which the University of Siedlce has a cooperation agreement (and still boasts about it on its website), is the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation (RANEPA), in the past, the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (established by Lenin in 1921. ), which trains (also in 12 regional academies), among others, the personnel resources of the Federal Security Service, and a representative of this service (Igor Aleksandrovich Bidenko) is an official advisor to the prorector of RANEPA! For the record, it is worth mentioning that at least one university conference in Siedlce hosted Prof. Natalia Frolova precisely from RANEPA with a lecture on ‘Human potential development in contemporary realities’ (in October 2018).
To make things even more interesting, it is worth noting that in the endless political and media games of the Tusk government about Collegium Humanum (we do not dispute any findings of the prosecutor’s office in this case!), there also appeared a justifiable allegation of cooperation of this university with RANEPA, and after all, as the pro-government media write, ‘the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, with which Collegium Humanum cooperated, is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted universities’.
True, but why does the above allegation not also apply to the state university in Siedlce, where a very good acquaintance of Gen. Jarosław Stróżyk sits in the position of rector and still today boasts of cooperation with ‘one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted universities’, i.e., RANEPA?
Union No. 3 – ‘Poland-Russia’ Organising Committee (Jarosław Stróżyk)
Rector Miroslaw Minkina and the university he heads, are also known for organising – and this was after Russia attacked Ukraine in 2014. – many international seminars and conferences in the series ‘Poland-Russia’, with the participation of Russian and Belarusian researchers and the Ambassador of the Russian Federation himself, Sergei Andreyev! Minkina himself explained this by the need to build bridges between Poland and Russia amid political conflict and misunderstanding. Another participant in the Siedlce Polish-Russian conferences, General Boguslaw Pacek, a former officer in the Military Service and, during the ‘reset’ policy period, a supporter of cooperation between the National Defence Academy and the General Staff Academy of the Russian Armed Forces, about which he held talks with Ambassador Aleksandr Alekseev and Colonel Dmitry Bondar (GRU), explained the same. Until recently, the University of Siedlce maintained a special website, which documented all Polish-Russian initiatives initiated at the university. However, the page has disappeared, but a lot of information about pro-Russian initiatives by the University of Siedlce and its current rector can still be found online.
On one of the university’s websites, we easily found materials concerning the 6th International Scientific Conference in the series ‘Poland-Russia’ on the topic: ‘The Geopolitical Dimension of Russia-West Relations’ (14-15 November 2019), which was co-organised by the Russian-linked Tambov G. Dzerzhavin State University in Tambov, with which, by the way, the University of Siedlce has concluded a cooperation agreement.
Most importantly, among the members of the Organising Committee of the conference was the name of Prof. Minkina’s recently promoted Dr. Jarosław Stróżyk with an unambiguous affiliation: University of Natural Sciences and Humanities (UPH) in Siedlce!
And most importantly, among the members of the Organising Committee of the conference was the name of Dr. Jarosław Stróżyk, recently promoted by Prof. Minkina, with the unequivocal affiliation: University of Natural Sciences and Humanities (UPH) in Siedlce!
But that’s not all, because the name of the chairman of the Government Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influences is adjacent to, among others, the well-known to us… Prof. Dr. Vladimir Yurievich Stromov (1977-2022) – rector of the G. Dzerzhavin State University in Tambov! Stromov, like Strozhik, co-founded the Organising Committee of the 6th International Scientific Conference in the series ‘Poland-Russia’, and was already known at that time for his imperial views and ties to the Russian security sector.
2009 r. Stromov defended his doctoral thesis at the Volgograd Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (topic: ‘The system of penalties – implementation and effectiveness’), and, while serving as rector of the G. Dzerzhavin in Tambov, he opened a military faculty there (called for by President Vladimir Putin); at the invitation of Sergei Shoygu, he gave a lecture at the Ministry of Defence on the university’s cooperation with the military and the military-industrial complex; shortly before his death, he supported Russia’s invasion against Ukraine and signed a letter of university representatives supporting the ‘demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine’. He was elected to the Tambov Regional Duma in 2011 and 2016 and served as vice-chairman of the United Russia faction (Putin’s party).
Siedlce: here is Poland, not Russia!
The University of Siedlce could be the subject of many a doctoral dissertation, not to mention in-depth counterintelligence analyses explaining both the subservience of successive governments to this university and its staff and the constant predilection to seek contacts in Russia.
This is because, for many years, the university has been, in its successive organisational mutations and names (including the Higher School of Agriculture and Pedagogy, the Georgi Dymitrov Higher School of Agriculture and Pedagogy, the Georgi Dymitrov Higher School of Agriculture and Pedagogy and the Academy of Russian Studies). Georgi Dymitrov, Podlasie Academy or the University of Natural Sciences and Humanities), an exceptional concentration of post-communists originating mainly from the People’s Army of Poland (including graduates of the Military Academy of Politics and politricks from the Main Political Board) and the communist secret service community (including GRU trainees and SB officers), with views and contacts that are often dangerous to our security. However, one would be wrong who regard the University of Siedlce merely as a repository of communist dinosaurs from the F. Dzerzhinsky Military Political Academy and the V. Vasilevska Military Historical Institute, who look nostalgically to the East… And that is precisely the counterintelligence challenge for Poland!
Due to his close ties with Prof. Col. Mirosław Minkina and with the University of Siedlce, which has become a gateway for Russian influence disguised as scientific cooperation, Gen. Dr. Jarosław Stróżyk is not in a position to take up this counter-intelligence challenge either as head of the Internal Security Service (SKW) or as chairman of the Government Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influence. He should be immediately removed from both these positions, which does not mean that someone with such connections and contacts should be teaching students at the Academy of Military Arts, where he became a lecturer some time ago.
Besides, Dr Stróżyk’s words about ‘not believing in a full-scale war, not believing in a full-scale Russian attack on Ukraine’ (TVN24, 5 February 2022), sound completely different today in the light of the above facts… The same is true of the position presented by Gen. Stróżyk, this time as chairman of the Government Commission investigating Russian and Belarusian influence, on the liquidation of the IPN ‘restricted collection’ and the de-Bubekization law. In light of our knowledge of the post-communist society that has been swirling around the University of Siedlce for years, this position should be clearer to us.