After two years of absence from official government channels, the report of the commission for investigating Russian influence has once again entered public circulation. The document has been published on the website of the National Security Bureau. Below are its main theses.
The report, removed from state websites by order of Prime Minister Donald Tusk in 2023, is returning to public debate. The commission appointed by the previous government examined Russian influence on Poland’s security in the years 2007-2022. Its findings concerning cooperation between Polish special services and Russia’s FSB raise serious questions about state security during the first term of the current prime minister, Donald Tusk.
The Military Counterintelligence Service under Russian influence. “The full scope of cooperation was concealed from the prime minister.”
The most serious allegation in the report is the assertion that the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) – an institution established to protect the Polish Armed Forces against foreign intelligence – fell under the influence of the Russian Federation itself. According to the commission’s findings, this occurred with the approval of the highest state authorities.
A key moment was Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s decision in December 2011 to authorize cooperation between the SKW and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Notably, the report emphasizes that the prime minister made this decision without the legally required consultation with the Minister of National Defense. As cooperation deepened, an official agreement between the SKW and the FSB was signed on 11 September 2013 in St. Petersburg. The document was negotiated by Brigadier General Janusz Nosek, then head of the SKW, with the participation of Brigadier General Piotr Pytel and Colonel Krzysztof Dusza.
The report reveals that between April 2010 and December 2011, cooperation took place without the prime minister’s formal consent and without documented awareness on the part of the minister of defense. During this period, at least 107 meetings were held between SKW representatives and FSB officers, most of which were not documented.
The commission confirmed the validity of charges brought in 2017 by the Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office against the SKW leadership. These concerned concealing “from the President of the Council of Ministers the full scope of the undertaken cooperation.” This is particularly significant given that – as the report stresses – “the greatest threat to the country’s defense and the security of the Polish Armed Forces came from the special services of the Russian Federation, whose objectives were at odds with those of Poland and NATO.” The then-minister of national defense, Tomasz Siemoniak, who directly supervised the SKW, according to the commission’s findings, “accepted a situation in which the prime minister might have been inadequately informed about the seriousness of the problem.”
Conflict with NATO obligations
The report states that the 2013 agreement was detrimental to Poland’s interests also because it conflicted with NATO commitments. Moreover, SKW contacts with the FSB were, for a long time, conducted covertly from the Internal Security Agency (ABW), which has the statutory role of the National Security Authority. According to the commission, cooperation with the FSB fostered among some SKW officers a perception of having established “allied relations” with the Russian service as a “partner,” thereby reducing counterintelligence vigilance regarding Russia.
The report refutes the official justification for signing the agreement. “In light of the reviewed documents, the claim that the agreement was signed out of a need to secure evacuation routes for the Polish Military Contingent from Afghanistan finds no factual confirmation,” the document states.
The commission also characterizes as “deliberate disinformation” the public statements of former SKW heads General Nosek and General Pytel, who in later years accused PiS governments of being submissive toward Russia while downplaying the significance of their own cooperation with the FSB.
Political consequences. Yet Tusk nevertheless became prime minister
The report ends with an unequivocal recommendation: individuals identified in the document “should not in the future hold public positions connected with the security of the Republic of Poland.”
“Regarding former prime minister Donald Tusk and ministers Jacek Cichocki, Bogdan Klich, Tomasz Siemoniak, and Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, the commission recommends that they not be entrusted with tasks, posts, or public functions involving responsibility for state security,”
the report states.
And how did it end? On 13 December 2023, Donald Tusk assumed power, removing the report from public circulation. The document’s reappearance raises questions about the political motives behind its earlier removal and about what consequences should be borne by those responsible for the security-related failures described in the report.