Polexit and Russian disinformation: Why facts are Poland’s best defense

Poland’s far right has been calling for Polexit for years. Now the Kremlin has joined the campaign — with far greater resources and far less transparency.

Where the idea came from

Polexit was not invented by Russia. It grew out of real Polish politics, which is precisely what makes it such a useful vehicle for foreign manipulation.

The term emerged after Brexit, when Polish far-right and nationalist circles began floating the idea that Poland might follow Britain out of the EU. For years it stayed on the political fringe. There is an actual party called PolExit, founded by Stanisław Żółtek, who received just 0.23% of the vote in the 2020 presidential election. But the idea never really went away, and over time it found a wider audience.

During the years of the Law and Justice government, tensions with Brussels over judicial independence kept the question simmering. By 2023, far-right marchers in Warsaw were already carrying Polexit banners, and figures like Grzegorz Braun—a radical politician who has since built a growing movement—were calling openly for Poland to leave the EU immediately. According to Notes From Poland, a poll from December 2025 found that nearly a quarter of Poles, 24.7%, now support Polexit—a significant rise driven largely by opposition voters, rural communities, and people aged 30 to 49. The majority still oppose it, at 65.7%, but the trend is moving in the wrong direction.

The grievances fueling this shift are genuine: frustration with EU regulations, debates over sovereignty, and a sense among some Poles that Brussels sets the rules while Warsaw pays the price. These are real political feelings, which is exactly why they are so easy to exploit. Russia does not need to manufacture the emotion from scratch. It only needs to amplify what is already there—and to do so at scale, before anyone notices.

The answer to propaganda is numbers

There is a version of the Polexit debate that lives entirely in emotion: sovereignty, pride, frustration with Brussels, a vague sense that Poland is not the master of its own fate. That version is easy to spread and hard to argue with, because it was never really an argument to begin with.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski is choosing a different approach. On Thursday, February 26, he is set to address the Sejm with concrete figures—preliminary estimates of what leaving the European Union would actually mean for Poland in practice, first reported by Onet and covered by European Pravda.

Within the first five to ten years after a hypothetical exit, Poland’s GDP could fall by between 4% and 7%. Wages could drop by as much as 8%. Exports of meat and dairy—a cornerstone of Polish agriculture—could collapse by 45 to 50 percent. These are not warnings pulled from thin air. They are projections that give voters something they can weigh against the emotional pull of populist rhetoric.

Sikorski will also remind lawmakers of what EU membership still offers in practical terms: access to the SAFE rearmament program, which would allow Poland to use European financial capacity for defense. Warsaw stands to receive around 43.7 billion euros in preferential loans under the scheme. His message, in his own words, will be direct: “Let us not look for enemies where we have allies. The threat to the sovereignty and security of the Republic of Poland comes from one direction—from the East.”

This is what responsible political communication looks like. Not slogans, but calculations. Not fear, but specifics.

Russia isn’t waiting for the debate to happen organically

The problem is that the other side in this debate is not Poland’s domestic opposition alone. Russia has been actively manufacturing the Polexit narrative—and not through traditional media or political pressure, but through AI-generated women on TikTok.

An investigation by Insight News Media published in December 2025 documented a coordinated information operation targeting Polish audiences at scale. The videos follow a recognizable pattern: young women, apparently Polish, wearing national symbols, speaking calmly and earnestly about sovereignty and disillusionment with the EU. One of the messages circulating, as documented by Quasa, went: “I want Polexit because I want freedom of choice, even if it will be more expensive. I don’t remember Poland before the European Union, but I feel it was more Polish then.” The conclusion these videos always reach is the same—leaving is the rational choice.

None of it is real. The account behind the videos, called “Prawilne Polki,” had been dormant since 2023 before suddenly pivoting in mid-December 2025 to flood TikTok with pro-Polexit content. Polish government spokesman Adam Szłapka, according to RMF24, publicly confirmed the videos are Russian disinformation produced by artificial intelligence. The campaign was also flagged by the European Analytical Collective Res Futura, which tracked how the content was algorithmically optimized for TikTok’s recommendation engine—each video slightly different, each one designed to slip through moderation before it could be caught.

One detail makes the operation’s origins hard to miss: despite the videos featuring apparently Polish women speaking Polish, the syntax carries traces of Russian phrasing. The sentences feel off to native speakers—grammatically close, but rhythmically foreign.

The Polish government responded with unusual speed. It formally requested the European Commission to open proceedings against TikTok under the Digital Services Act, arguing the platform failed to detect or remove coordinated AI-generated political manipulation. Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs Dariusz Standerski submitted the request to Commission Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, asking TikTok to explain how widely the content spread, what moderation was applied, and whether the platform had assessed the systemic risks the DSA requires it to monitor.

Insight News also observed a notable spike in pro-Kremlin, anti-EU, and anti-Ukrainian content circulating in Poland around Christmas 2025 and during key diplomatic moments. The timing was deliberate. It always is.

Facts are a form of resistance

This is where the two threads of this story connect. Sikorski’s parliamentary address and Russia’s TikTok operation are responses to the same political terrain—and they represent opposite bets on how public opinion is shaped.

Russia’s bet is on emotion, repetition, and manufactured authenticity. An AI-generated face feels personal in a way that a policy document never will. A woman speaking softly about sovereignty reaches people who would never sit through a parliamentary debate. The operation doesn’t need to convince everyone. It only needs to normalize the idea and make Polexit feel like something reasonable people discuss rather than a Kremlin-manufactured talking point.

Sikorski’s bet is on specifics. A 7% GDP contraction is not something you can argue away with appeals to national pride. An 8% wage cut is something every working person in Poland can calculate against their own life. These numbers don’t just rebut the narrative—they change the terms of the conversation entirely.

That is the point. Against populists who trade in vague grievances and against a disinformation machine that can produce thousands of emotionally resonant videos overnight, the most effective response is not a counter-narrative. It is facts, clearly stated, with the sources to back them up. It is an analysis that treats citizens as people capable of understanding what the numbers mean.

Poland is showing, in real time, what it looks like to fight propaganda with evidence. The question is whether that evidence reaches the same screens as the fake girls.