Poland's Government Security Centre (RCB) sent an alert on Monday evening to residents of Lublin province over a Russian air attack on Ukraine. Some messages also went, in error, to people in Lubusz province.
Michał Marek, head of the External Threat Analysis Team at NASK, said Russians and Belarusians spread word of the slip on supposedly unofficial Telegram channels "directly run by the services". Official news agencies and main portals largely ignored it.
"It was not especially prominent", Marek told Polish Press Agency (PAP). The aim, he said, was to contrast Poland with supposedly efficient Russian and Belarusian state machinery, feeding a broader effort to denigrate the country.
The messaging suits Moscow's domestic politics, Marek said, by casting Russia as an island of stability in a sea of chaos, against a West "paralysed by various problems". Propaganda leans heavily on illegal migration and "treacherous and incompetent state elites".
Captain Maciej Milczanowski, head of the War Studies Department at the University of Rzeszów, was less sanguine.
"In Russia this information message will be very effective and, unfortunately, will resonate strongly in Poland and Western countries", he told PAP.
He said such errors are unavoidable, but this one also reflects Poland's slow adaptation to the war next door. The delays extend to school evacuation drills and military drones, he said, with changes coming only after events of an "almost kinetic character".
"Successive governments avoided dealing with practice alarms in schools so their poll ratings would not fall", Milczanowski said. Drills do not scare people, he argued: "If people know what to do, they are less afraid, because activity replaces fear".
He urged Poland to adopt an app like Ukraine's, which lets every citizen report dangers, without waiting for something bad to happen.
"The lack of strategy in successive governments' information policy in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine is striking", he said.
Milczanowski expects similar mistakes to recur, and Russia to exploit them.
(jh)
Source: PAP