A forged dispatch from Poland’s official wire service announced the call-up of 200,000 men for possible deployment to Ukraine. It was online only briefly, it was entirely false, and it revealed how a trusted newsroom can be turned into the delivery system for someone else’s lie.
On 31 May 2024, a story appeared on the wire of the Polish Press Agency, the country’s official state news service, known by its initials PAP. It reported that Prime Minister Donald Tusk was set to announce the mobilization of 200,000 Polish men, starting on 1 July, with the possibility of deployment to Ukraine. It was the kind of dispatch that, coming from a national wire agency, editors across the country would ordinarily treat as authoritative and pass along without a second thought. It was also completely fabricated. Tusk had announced no such thing. The agency had been hacked.
A short window and a big claim
The fake dispatch was live only briefly before PAP staff spotted it and pulled it down. According to reporting collected by Notes From Poland, the false story was posted, removed, and then posted again, forcing the agency to issue urgent corrections stating that the mobilization report was untrue and that its systems had been compromised.
Brevity was not much of a defence. In a modern information environment, a wire dispatch does not need to stay up for long to do its work. A screenshot taken in the first seconds outlives the correction, and it carries the one thing an ordinary piece of disinformation can never buy, which is the letterhead of a state news agency. The screenshot says PAP, and PAP is supposed to be beyond question.
Why this target
The attack was clever precisely because it did not try to build credibility. It stole it. Standing up a fake news site takes months of seeding before anyone believes it, and even then the audience is small. Breaking into a trusted wire service for a few minutes borrows an institution’s entire reputation at once. The lie inherits the credibility of the source, and the source is one that regional and national outlets are structurally inclined to trust and republish.
The content was chosen with equal care. A false mobilization order strikes at one of the most sensitive nerves in any country bordering the war: the fear of being dragged into direct conflict. As documented by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the fabricated call-up was designed to stoke exactly that anxiety, to suggest that the government was quietly preparing to send Poles to fight, and to widen any gap between a pro-Ukrainian government and a public wary of the costs.
Attribution and timing
Polish officials moved quickly to blame Russia. Prime Minister Tusk pointed to foreign interference, and the government said the incident bore the marks of a Russia-linked operation. The deputy prime minister responsible for digitisation, Krzysztof Gawkowski, publicly attributed the hack to the Russian side, and Polish authorities opened an investigation into how the agency’s systems had been breached.
The timing sharpened the message. The fake dispatch landed in the days before the European Parliament elections, a period when tension over the war and over Poland’s role in it was already high, and when a shock about mobilization would travel fast. Poland has been among the most exposed countries in Europe to Russian information and cyber operations, a frontline state for a war being fought partly through screens, and the PAP hack fit a broader pattern of attempts to unsettle Polish opinion and drive a wedge between the country and its support for Kyiv.
Outcome and what changed
The immediate damage was contained. PAP corrected the record within the hour, the mobilization claim was widely debunked, and no mass panic followed. Polish authorities pursued the breach as a criminal and national-security matter and folded it into their public case that Russia was running a sustained campaign against the country ahead of the European elections.
What changed since is the posture rather than the threat. Poland treated the hack as confirmation that its information space was a live battlefield and moved to harden the security of state media and critical communications, while officials grew markedly quicker to attribute such incidents to Moscow in public. The threat itself did not recede, because the vulnerability the hack exploited was never really technical. The most valuable thing a news organisation owns is its credibility, and credibility can be hijacked without changing a single genuine fact the outlet has ever published. The forged dispatch was online for a matter of minutes. The question it raised, about how much anyone can trust a screenshot bearing a familiar logo, does not have a two-minute answer.
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