Since mid-May 2026, TV Republika and its leading journalists have been the targets of an unprecedented and coordinated harassment campaign using so-called swatting tactics. A series of dozens of false alerts about alleged explosive devices or suicide attempts has resulted in police interventions at employees’ homes and at the broadcaster’s headquarters itself, interventions raising serious procedural doubts. This is a coordinated campaign of information-driven intimidation designed to paralyze Poland’s largest conservative media outlet. Meanwhile, the state apparatus under Donald Tusk’s government has shown helplessness toward the perpetrators, while at the same time displaying a striking overreach in its actions against the victims.
“Never in my life have I dealt with police like this. Even in the days of the communist Security Service, officers would identify themselves when asked,” Tomasz Sakiewicz, editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska and CEO of TV Republika, said, referring to the forced police entry into his Warsaw apartment, which also serves as an office.
He was echoed by the station’s programming director, Michał Rachoń, who sharply criticized the government’s stance: “Unless Mr. Kierwiński and Mr. Siemoniak, you know perfectly well who is doing this? Unless you are the organizers of this operation? (…) We demand an immediate response to this scandal!”
The wave of attacks on TV Republika began shortly after Zbigniew Ziobro, former minister of justice and prosecutor general, became the station’s political commentator from the United States, a move that enraged Donald Tusk’s team, which has been ineffectively pursuing him. Within just a few days, emergency services received dozens of reports concerning the private addresses of journalists, including Tomasz Sakiewicz, Michał Rachoń, Adrian Klarenbach, and Katarzyna Gójska, as well as the station’s newsroom itself. The reports alleged planted bombs, children in danger, or terrorism, including, allegedly, a threat from an attacker wearing a so-called suicide belt. This mechanism, known as swatting, is based on intentionally deceiving law enforcement, including through phone and email spoofing. Because emergency services are required to respond immediately to life-threatening situations, armed patrols are sent to the scene, which is intended to intimidate the victim.
The effects of this massive attack were not limited to repeated evacuations of the television building and disruption to the station’s operations. This operation should be viewed as a form of terrorism designed to create a chilling effect and to systematically silence the most important newsroom in the country that is scrutinizing the current government.
“Someone knew the procedure inside out”
The culmination of the operation against TV Republika was a forceful police raid into Tomasz Sakiewicz’s Warsaw apartment on Wiktorska Street, which also serves as an editorial office.
The provocation took place on Friday, May 15. The pretext for the forcible intervention was a false report, submitted through the Children’s Rights Ombudsman’s hotline, about an alleged teenager threatening suicide. Independent of this, a few minutes earlier, the police and the Internal Security Agency received an email containing the following message: “I’m on Wiktorska Street… I’m committing suicide, I’m wearing a suicide belt, I’ll blow everything the f*** up.” Attached to the email was an audio file containing a recording of a child’s voice. “These messages were sent almost simultaneously, one right after the other. Someone knew the procedure inside out. They knew that an email alone might not work,” an informant told the Niezależna.pl portal.
The course of the operation in the premises occupied by Tomasz Sakiewicz was marked by scandalousprocedural violations and irregularities. As Niezależna.pl established, the police and medical reports that were made available contain significant chronological gaps. “In the documents of Meditrans, the ambulance service that carried out the assignment and provided the crew, nothing adds up. There is a note that the ambulance left for the call at 1:38 p.m. Exactly the same time is listed as the time of arrival. We were told that this is a highly unusual record. There is also no record indicating whether the intervention was initiated or completed. That, too, should appear in the documentation,” the portal wrote.
Although a police patrol was already outside the property at 1:40 p.m. and formally began the intervention at 1:41 p.m., the recording devices, so-called body-worn cameras, were activated by the officers only at 1:42 p.m., contrary to initial claims. One minute later, the officers entered the premises.
Equally striking is the fact that the recording cuts off at 1:54 p.m., when the uniformed officers leave the apartment, yet the formal conclusion of the operation was recorded only at around 2:40 p.m. Why did the officers activate their cameras with a delay, and what happened during the several dozen minutes after they left?
The conduct of the officers themselves resembled the worst methods of a police state. The police officers had neither name tags nor identification badges on their uniforms, and there was no patch with a unit number making it virtually impossible to verify their identity. When the editor-in-chief’s assistant refused to identify herself to an unmarked uniformed officer, she was brutally handcuffed and then taken outside without any outer clothing.
The authorities’ response to these drastic abuses is downright disgraceful. Deputy Interior Minister Czesław Mroczek, presenting information in the Senate about the wave of swatting incidents, stated that he had “not noticed any irregularities in the officers’ actions.” The police, for their part, claimed that the assistant was violently handcuffed for her own safety.
The state is therefore showing an unprecedented level of leniency toward procedural violations by the services and helplessness toward cybercriminals. The latter is being explained by the “highly complex nature of the case.” “What we are seeing are coordinated large-scale operations. All actions carried out over the last several dozen hours have been strictly technical in nature and have been based on digital security measures and IT analyses,” said Piotr Antoni Skiba, spokesman for the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw.
Instead of showing solidarity in defense of press freedom, mainstream government-aligned media outletsused the situation to launch a smear campaign. The TVN24 portal published a report suggesting ambiguities surrounding the assistant’s presence in the apartment of TV Republika’s head and mocking the fact that Tomasz Sakiewicz was changing clothes in the bathroom when the services police stormed the premises.
Michał Rachoń responded to this crude narrative. “Now Tomasz Sakiewicz is supposed to explain why he was changing clothes in his own home when Donald Tusk’s services raided him at home and humiliated his assistant,” he said. As he noted, the author of the TVN24 article was drawing on “the finest traditions of the Military Information Services.”
The state is capitulating
The wave of attacks on the TV Republika community has exposed not only the brutality of the perpetrators, but also the long-standing, systemic state incapacity in the face of cybercrime. The hackers’ actions make use of so-called spoofing, which involves impersonating other people’s phone numbers and email addresses. In this way, blame is shifted onto innocent people, who often become victims twice over.
This was the fate of internet creators whose data was used to trigger false alerts targeting journalists. One of them is YouTuber Jan Adryański, known online as “Sou Shibo.” Since 2023, he himself has been the victim of large-scale spoofing and swatting, which he has repeatedly reported to law enforcement authorities, to no effect. When, during the May wave of attacks on TV Republika, his name was used in false reports, the state finally “acted.” But instead of catching the hackers, the services seized the YouTuber’s equipment, treating a long-time victim almost as if he were the perpetrator.
Even more shocking is the story of Dawid Bączkowski, who operates online under the pseudonym “Bonkol.” For more than two years, his home and the addresses of his family members have been targeted by identical false calls to the police, fire brigade, and ambulance services. The perpetrators have also harassed him by ordering hundreds of unpaid meals in his name.
Bączkowski, like the TV Republika community, sounded the alarm: “These are not jokes. These are well-prepared operations aimed at destroying the health and lives of many people and destabilizing the state.”
But how does the Polish state protect citizens from such terror? The investigation into Bączkowski’s case, conducted by the services, was scandalously discontinued just eight days before the media storm surrounding TV Republika erupted.
The devastated YouTuber wrote on social media: “Today I found out that the investigation into my case, conducted by the Central Cybercrime Bureau in Katowice, was DISCONTINUED eight days ago.” Addressing the police, he asked bitterly: “Are we leaving it like this and waiting until one of us breaks down completely, or is there any chance of someone from, for example, Warsaw contacting us?”
TV Republika’s programming director, Michał Rachoń, reacted sharply to this incomprehensible capitulation by the services: “For three years, you bunch of incompetents, you have been unable to do anything about this case, and now you have discontinued the proceedings?! What is going on here?”
As part of the same operation, cybercriminals also freely used the data of public figures. One of the victims of this practice was Confederation MP Sławomir Mentzen. Hackers used the phone number of his office to order enormous amounts of food in the middle of the night to the homes of journalists from the conservative television station.
What is compromising for law enforcement is the fact that it was not they who uncovered this lead. “Interestingly, this was not established by the police or by any of the services. It was established by TV Republika’s journalists themselves, who drove around to pizzerias and asked employees whether they had any information about the people placing the orders!” the politician revealed.
Mentzen did not hide his outrage at the attitude of the government and the formations under its control. “The government has a duty to find the perpetrators as quickly as possible and protect the victims. The police, the Internal Security Agency, and other services are not organs of a party, but of the state. Their duty is to ensure the safety of everyone, regardless of political preferences or public activity,” the MP wrote.
He summed up the entire situation in exceptionally strong words: “I lack the words to describe your vileness. Get to work at last, because it is you who are responsible for the fact that our state, once again, is completely failing to function!”
Who is pulling the strings?
One thing is beyond doubt: the wave of false alerts targeting TV Republika is highly organized and fully professional in nature. The scale, precision, coordination, and technical sophistication of the operations, masking IP addresses, taking over accounts and email inboxes, and mass spoofing go far beyond the capabilities of ordinary hooligans.
Moreover, the cybercriminals possessed non-public knowledge about their victims. A perfect example is the police call concerning a station employee who has a 13-year-old son, based on an alleged suicide attempt by a boy of the same age. The perpetrators knew details of her private life, which, as Tomasz Sakiewicz himself emphasized, were not even known to the newsroom’s management.
Two main leads have emerged in the public sphere. The first, unofficially suggested by some experts and services, is the so-called eastern lead, an element of hybrid warfare conducted by organized hacking groups linked to Russia or Belarus. The purpose of such disinformation operations is said to be the paralysis of Polish institutions, the sowing of chaos, the overburdening of the emergency response system, and the deepening of social polarization.
The second lead points to radical domestic political circles hostile to the opposition, which may perhaps be supported by the current authorities.
Regardless of who is technically pulling the strings, the aggressive rhetoric of Donald Tusk’s supporters toward TV Republika may have emboldened the perpetrators and created an atmosphere of tacit consent for this kind of harassment.
In the face of such a powerful attack, the passivity of the current government and the services subordinate to it is deeply troubling. So are the double standards: if similar information terrorism had targeted journalists from liberal media outlets such as TVN or Gazeta Wyborcza, the response of Waldemar Żurek’s prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of the Interior and Administration headed by Marcin Kierwiński would have been immediate, and every possible resource would have been deployed to capture the perpetrators. Meanwhile, when the victims are conservatives, the state apparatus displays a degree of helplessness and sluggishness that is almost astonishing.
The ongoing attacks form part of a much broader assault on freedom of speech, as well as an attempt to economically and operationally destroy the country’s largest conservative television station. Evacuations of the building and interruptions of live programming are yet another blow against a station that had previously been forced to confront politically inspired attempts at an advertising boycott aimed at “starving it out.”
President Karol Nawrocki summed it up aptly when he spoke in defense of those attacked: “If a journalist in Poland has to wonder whether the next false report will end with the services entering their home, handcuffing their colleagues and searching the premises without a warrant, then it means that the state is failing to provide the basic standards of democracy and freedom of speech.”