In an interview with Polish Press Agency (PAP), Katarzyna Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz, an analyst at the Gabriel Narutowicz Institute of Political Thought, described the narrative as anti-Ukrainian, antisemitic and anti-elite. She said it was becoming increasingly common in Polish political discourse.
Since 2022 it had circulated in the corners of social media and on leaflets handed out in the street, she said. It entered political language when Grzegorz Braun, leader of the Confederation of the Polish Crown, began using the term.
The theory falsely claims that Jews, for whom the Middle East is growing more dangerous, will settle southern Ukraine, while displaced Ukrainians head for lands along the Vistula. It casts Ukrainians as a tool of a "Jewish lobby" and accuses Poland's entire parliamentary class of betraying national interests by serving "foreigners", including Germany, the United States and Britain.
Like other conspiracy theories, it mixes lies and half-truths with real events, in this case the wave of war refugees after Russia's 2022 invasion, Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz said.
"The essence of this false story is building fear that the Polish nation will disappear or be dominated by foreigners", she said.
She traced the idea to the early 20th century, when defenders of the tsarist order cast Khazaria, a medieval state whose elites adopted Judaism, as a symbolic enemy of "holy Rus". The narrative was later used domestically in the Soviet era and after 1989, she said.
It was then turned against Ukraine's Euromaidan protests of 2013-14, when pro-Russian circles portrayed Kyiv's new leaders as "foreign" and as planning a new state in the south, she said. It failed to catch on among Ukrainians, who also embraced a related slur about "Jewish-Banderites" with humour, printing T-shirts that read "I am a Jewish-Banderite".
Kwiatkowska-Moskalewicz, author of a report on the subject, said it was based solely on open sources and did not claim the Kremlin directly steers the process. But she said conceptual analysis pointed to tsarist roots, and that the theory's use as a political tool closely resembled what happened earlier in Russia and post-Maidan Ukraine.
She said the language of the narrative was radicalising "from week to week".
"Ten years ago we would have considered it surreal language or literary fiction. Today we are starting to normalise it", she said.
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Source: PAP