According to the Czech portal Seznam Zprávy a disinformation campaign used AI-generated images, impersonated accounts and paid Facebook ads to convince audiences that Poland and the Czech Republic were locked in conflict over the Cieszyn Silesia region.
The campaign has been exploiting historical disputes over the region with the aim of damaging Polish-Czech relations and has included fabricated documents, a fake Czech diplomat and an announcement of a demonstration.
In fact the last time there was any demonstration on that border was during the Covid pandemic in 2020 when Czechs protested about limiting access for Poles to come across to their part of a town that is shared by the two nations.
Polish security services and experts reportedly suspect that Russia may be behind the current campaign, although there is currently no definitive confirmation of that being the case.
Cieszyn is a town right on the border which is divided by the river with one side located in Czechia and one in Poland and is part of a region to which Poland and Czechia have in the past laid territorial claims.
Seznam Zprávy described how the disinformation activities began on the Polish side of the border. First, a forged document appeared online, purportedly issued by the Polish Government and concerning territorial claims against Czechia.
The fake Polish Foreign Ministry document that served as the campaign’s central prop contained a revealing feature. It was written in Czech throughout, except for the final two words, which abruptly switched to Polish.
It was circulated by a profile impersonating the Czech ambassador to Poland, Břetislav Dančák, followed by the creation of a fraudulent copy of the Czech public radio website, where a fake article was published suggesting that residents of the border region had already begun selling their homes for fear of changes to the border.
The fake ambassador account posted a deepfake reel from an AI-generated video in which a likeness of the real diplomat appeared to express opposition to the alleged Polish territorial demands. That video had accumulated approximately 10,000 views before it was discovered and removed.
The next stage involved a cyberattack on the website of Polish regional broadcaster Radio PiK, where an article appeared claiming that Poland planned to seize Czech territory. The article was subsequently removed and Polish institutions responsible for cybersecurity, as well as the police, are investigating the matter.
Radio PiK, based in Bydgoszcz, is a public regional broadcaster serving Poland’s Pomerania and Kujawy region. Its editorial CMS — the software platform through which journalists and editors publish and modify online content — was accessed by unknown actors who replaced a legitimate article with a fabricated piece claiming Poland had formally demanded Czech territorial concessions of over 600 hectares.
The radio station in its own statement admitted that they had been hacked and removed the fabricated content: “Someone hacked into the editorial system of radiopik.pl and replaced the published text with a false one, about Poland allegedly planning to seize a piece of Czech territory. We firmly distance ourselves from this content and inform that we have nothing to do with it.”
At the centre of the operation was a fake account called “Adam Sikora”, which posed as a local resident on the Czech side of the region and accused Poland of pursuing “Polonisation” there and promoted a demonstration in the town of Třinec held under the banner of “Cieszyn Silesia is Czech”. The account claimed that Poland was planning to seize the whole of the contested region.
The profile picture of “Adam Sikora” shows signs of having been created using artificial intelligence. In an apparent attempt to make the account seem credible, its creator had previously purported to offer a house for sale in Ropice, near Český Těšín, which is the Czech part of the town of Cieszyn that lies on the border. The photographs of the property, a house that does not exist, were also generated by AI and Facebook itself labelled them as artificial, in a further attempt to suggest residents were being pressured to sell out of fear of Polish encroachment.
The effort was not limited to organic posts. A paid Facebook ad promoting the fictitious demonstration drew hundreds of reactions and stayed active for several days, evidence that the campaign was deliberately pushed to a wider audience rather than spread by chance.
The announced demonstration has proved to have been a fake. The authorities in Třinec said that no notification of the gathering had been submitted, even though the statutory deadline for doing so had already passed and a video promoting the protest also featured the logo of the KOVO trade union, which distanced itself from the event and said that its logo had been used without authorisation.
The false claims made in the campaign were built around a real historical episode, the adjustment of the Polish-Czechoslovak border in the 1950s, which organisers wove together with invented material to make the campaign more convincing.
Seznam Zprávy claims that those behind the campaign are exploiting a “grain of truth” in the form of the so-called border debt, which arose following adjustments to the border in the 1950s. It concerns approximately 368 hectares that are the subject of diplomatic talks and does not mean that Poland plans to unilaterally seize Czech territory.
According to the Czech Academy of Sciences, it is precisely the combination of a genuine dispute with false information that makes the operation potentially effective.
Poland’s State research institute NASK has said that the tactics used in the campaign echo methods previously tied to Russian-linked influence operations, though it has not yet been established who exactly orchestrated this campaign.
Russia’s hybrid activity against Poland has, according to the Polish Government, escalated sharply since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine with Poland currently absorbing roughly 4,000 cyberattacks per day.
NASK claims that the effort’s core achievement was the creation of a false impression: That a serious dispute exists between Poland and Czechia over borders and the national identity of Cieszyn Silesia’s residents.
The area of Cieszyn Silesia has been a source of a territorial dispute between Poland and Czechia since the 19th century. The region is multi-ethnic and both countries have claimed it as theirs since the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918.
The Polish side based its claim to the area on ethnic criteria: A majority of the area’s population was Polish and in 1919 there was a short-lived military conflict between Poland and Czechoslovakia over the region which was only stopped by a wider international agreement about the demarcation of territory in the region.
Poland annexed the region in 1938 taking advantage of Czechoslovakia being overrun by Hitler’s Germany that occurred after the Munich conference of the same year.
The territory was occupied by the Soviet Red Army in early May 1945 and the governments of the two countries so ravaged by war came to a settlement based on pre-Second World War borders that is valid to this day.
Relations between Poland and Czechoslovakia took a dramatic turn in 1968 when the then communist government in Warsaw decided to participate in the Soviet led Warsaw Pact military operation to overthrow the Dubček leadership after the Prague Spring.
Polish communist leader Władysław Gomułka suspected Dubček of being ready to cooperate with West Germany which at that time had not accepted the present Polish-German border on the river Oder that entailed the loss of German territories to Poland as part of the post-war settlement.
The decision for Polish troops to participate in the invasion of Czechoslovakia led to some protests in Poland, including one at the national harvest festival in Warsaw’s Tenth-Anniversary Stadium on September 8, 1968, when a man set himself alight and died of his injuries four days later.
Opponents of the communist regime in Poland had, though, already suffered repression after the student protests of March 1968, which the authorities answered with a purge of Jews from the communist party in the wake of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, and the protests were therefore easily contained.
In the 1970s Polish and Czech dissident movements such as Václav Havel’s Charter 77 made contact but in the 1980s it was Poland’s Solidarity movement which made the running in paving the way for the eventual collapse of communism.
Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact relations between Poland and Czechia have been cordial as both agreed on the need to join both NATO and the EU and there have been no attempts on either side of the border to make any changes in the demarcation of territory.
Both Czechia and Poland have thus far stayed out of the eurozone, both have backed Ukraine against Russia and have at varying times expressed scepticism about some internal policies pursued by the EU.
