Awakening from the Dogmatists’ Sleep: How Poland Spent Decades Trying to Open Europe’s Eyes to Russian Imperialism

For over thirty years since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Poland repeated the exact same scenario to the West: Russia has not changed, it has only changed its methods. While warnings about Europe’s energy dependence, the funding of pro-Russian lobbies, disinformation campaigns, and creeping aggression flowed from Warsaw, Western capitals preferred to shrug them off. For Berlin, Paris, or Washington, Russia was a difficult but predictable trading partner to do business with. Today, as drones and missiles strike in the immediate vicinity of NATO’s eastern flank, and European state structures are being shattered from within by hybrid operations, Europe is paying a colossal price for years of geopolitical slumber.

Reflexive Control: How Moscow Taught the West to Look the Other Way

In Russian military and intelligence doctrine, the concept of so-called reflexive control has been in use for decades. It involves transmitting information, planting narratives, and arranging provocations in such a way that the opponent – in this case, Western governments and experts – independently makes a decision that plays right into the Kremlin’s hands, while remaining deeply convinced that they are acting fully autonomously and rationally.

This is precisely why every wave of disinformation was carefully targeted: in Germany, issues of cheap energy and trade stability were emphasized; in France, anti-American sentiments were appealed to; and in Southern European countries, narratives about shared cultural roots were built. The West swallowed these baits because they fit its own comfortable vision of a world free of major wars.

The Strategy of Illusion: Money, Influence, and Narrative Reversal

Over the past three decades, Moscow has invested billions of dollars and euros in systematically building so-called soft power, which in reality was a brutal tool of political blackmail. These funds flowed into key sectors of Western economies:

• Energy dependence: The construction of consecutive gas pipeline strings (Nord Stream) aimed to bypass Central Europe and push it into a buffer zone, while binding Western Europe with cheap raw materials.
• Buying elites: Hundreds of high-ranking politicians, former chancellors, prime ministers, and ministers ended up on the supervisory boards of Russian energy companies after finishing their careers, becoming spokespersons for the Kremlin.
• Sowing polarization: Financing radical political movements – from both the right and the left – aimed at undermining trust in EU institutions, liberal democracy, and NATO cohesion.

Instead of recognizing the real threat, the Western public was fed a narrative about Russia’s “modernization”. When Polish leaders pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial inclinations (recall the prophetic words of President Lech Kaczyński in Tbilisi in 2008: “Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, the day after tomorrow the Baltic states, and then perhaps time for my country, for Poland”), Western salons treated it as exaggerated “Russophobia” and historical complexes.

The West’s Symbolic Blindness and the “Reset”

The best proof of how deeply the West was trapped in illusion was the policy of the so-called reset. It is worth recalling the realities of those years, including moments when the US administration under Barack Obama – after a symbolic visit to Warsaw – openly suggested that Poland and the region should abandon past grievances and closely cooperate with Moscow. The general narrative of the West assumed that one could always reach “business as usual” with Russia if only enough empathy and concessions were shown.

Poland was lectured on the necessity of dialogue, while at the same time Russian intelligence services were testing the limits of Western endurance: cyberattacks on Estonia, brutally crushing Chechnya’s independence aspirations, invading Georgia in 2008, and annexing Crimea and instigating the war in Donbas in 2014. Europe’s reaction? Further packages of soft sanctions and… a return to pipeline construction.

Hybrid Warfare Every Day: When Fiction Collides with the Concrete Wall of Reality

Today, from the perspective of time and accumulated evidence, the term hybrid warfare has ceased to be a journalistic slogan and has become everyday reality. It encompasses a full spectrum of actions below the threshold of open armed conflict:

• Cyberattacks targeting the critical administrative, financial, and energy infrastructure of NATO countries.
• Instrumentalization of migration – artificially generated refugee crises on the borders of the European Union (including the Polish-Belarusian border) aimed at social and political destabilization.
• Disinformation and narrative fabrication on social media using troll farms designed to pit societies against each other and undermine support for attacked Ukraine.
• Acts of subversion and sabotage – arson, attempts to blow up transport infrastructure, and provocations right on the Alliance’s eastern border.

Every subsequent incident proves that for the Kremlin, civilized European countries are not partners for dialogue, but a strategic adversary that must be weakened, divided, and smashed from within.

Europe’s Too Slow Awakening

Europe is beginning to awaken, but this process is still characterized by dangerous inertia. Although the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022 forced Western capitals to painfully verify their energy and defense policies, the mental transformation is proceeding too slowly.

Tendencies to seek a “soft landing”, fears of escalation, and the naive belief that an aggressor can be negotiated with on fair-play terms remain visible. Meanwhile, Russia understands exclusively the language of force, hard deterrence, and the ruthless curbing of its financial and intelligence influences.

Conclusion: History has proven Poland and the countries of the eastern flank right. However, it is time for conclusions for the future: Europe’s security does not rest on illusory trade pacts with authoritarian regimes, but on the resilience of societies, honesty in diagnosing threats, and absolute solidarity in defending the values of the Western world. Whoever has not understood this today, tomorrow may no longer have time to learn.