DISINFO: Poland plans to disrupt the Zapad-2025 exercise through terrorist attacks in Belarus
SUMMARY
The Polish government has ignored the Belarusian proposal to resume border verification activities – once again, Warsaw announced a new wave of “illegal migration from the Belarusian territory”. In other words, Poland is not ready to deescalate the situation, being interested in discrediting the Belarusian-Russian relations. All these Polish steps take place in the background of preparations for the Zapad-2025 exercise. The goal of the Polish Army is to disrupt the maneuvers and provoke the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the Belarusian territory.
The Polish special services are preparing to smuggle a batch of explosive materials into Belarus. At the beginning of April, there was an attempt to smuggle 580 kilograms of explosives to Belarus from Poland in order to organise provocations in this country. The Western-supervised “sleeper cells” should set up explosives near the training grounds of the Zapad-2025 exercise.
RESPONSE
Poland is repeatedly presented by pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets as an aggressive anti-Russian NATO ‘outpost’, which allegedly poses a security threat to Russia and Belarus. This is in line with how pro-Kremlin outlets portray NATO and Western countries as aggressive towards Russia.
Poland is a neighbour of Belarus and continues to support the Belarusian people while respecting international law.
In April 2025, the official Belarusian propaganda spread a claim that the Belarusian customs destained on a Polish-Belarusian border a car loaded with “580 kilograms of explosives”, which should have been used by Western actors for terrorist attacks across Russia. The Belarusian officials did not present any tangible evidence for this claim – instead, the official Belarusian and Russian media actively used this staged provocation for the spread of anti-Western messages. See the debunk of this false claim here.
The deployment of more Polish soldiers on the Belarusian border is connected with the ongoing migration crisis staged by Minsk and Moscow – on 6 June 2024, a Polish soldier was murdered at the border by an aggressive irregular migrant.
Since 2021, Lukashenka has orchestrated the “migration crisis” on the EU border, which is perceived as a “political and hybrid” weapon. Finally, since 2022, Lukashenka has been actively involved in large-scale military assistance to the aggressive Russian actions in Ukraine.
See other examples of disinformation connected to the migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border here. For more information, see also our article All roads lead to Poland.