Polish Minister: Russians pay Poles EUR 3-4 thousand for spreading disinformation online

Russians pay Poles EUR 3000 – 4000 for spreading disinformation online to influence and promote propaganda.

Krzysztof Gawkowski, Polish Minister of Digitalization, stated this at the Defence24 Days conference, a Militarnyi reporter from the scene shares.

He said that the new battlefield is disinformation, which helps to manipulate and influence public opinion.

However, as the Minister noted, it is very difficult to counteract it. This is because for the first time in history, another state has decided to pay citizens of another country to spread disinformation.

According to him, this regards about EUR 3 to 4 thousand for one person who will participate in such a project.

“Let’s call these things by their proper names. The answer to such a well-paid order is treason against the state, it is espionage, and anyone who thinks that you can make easy money simply and at the same time creates the very influence on the state, that is, weakens Polish defense in cyberspace,” Gawkowski says.

The Minister notes that Poland is subject to the most cyberattacks among the European Union states. In 2024, more than 600,000 incidents were recorded.

Today, the Russians are trying to influence critical infrastructure and elections through cyberattacks and penetration attempts. On the eve of the presidential elections, Poland is facing an unprecedented attempt to interfere with the Russian side.

This is not done by spreading disinformation in combination with hybrid attacks on Polish critical infrastructure to paralyze its normal functioning.

Last September, the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces reported that Russia had launched a large-scale disinformation campaign around the floods in Poland to destabilize society.

To create panic among citizens, Russia used a network of social media bots that had been created over many years to spread anti-vaccination messages during the coronavirus pandemic, and later anti-Ukrainian calls. Prior to that, in August, the Polish General Staff launched a campaign against Russian disinformation to counter Russian propaganda.

Defence24 Days is the largest security conference in Central and Eastern Europe dedicated to current challenges in the defense and security sector, which started on May 6 in Warsaw. Militarnyi is involved in covering this event as a media partner.