The claim is an interpretation offered by a Russian academic to a Russian state outlet, not a statement from the Polish government.
Poland's decision to send police forces to its border with Russia's Kaliningrad Region is being read in Moscow as an attempt to shift public attention away from a domestic political crisis, according to a Russian academic quoted by TASS. Sergey Blagov, who heads the Polish Studies Department at the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, told the state news agency that the deployment should be understood as a diversion from troubles in Warsaw rather than a response to any external threat.
The domestic dispute centres on the Constitutional Tribunal. According to TASS, Prime Minister Donald Tusk appointed Maciej Berek, a former member of his cabinet, as a judge on the tribunal, a move that triggered a political crisis. The tribunal building has seen regular protests in recent weeks. On 30 October, Waldemar Zurek, described as a senior judicial official, filed a motion to suspend the acting president of the tribunal, Bogdan Swieczkowski, from his duties and to strip him of immunity. Reinforced police units were brought in to secure the premises, and on the night of 31 October protesters gathered near the building and attempted to breach the perimeter fencing. Police detained three people.
Blagov's argument, as reported by TASS, is that this crisis is being used as a pretext. "It appears that the ongoing domestic political crisis in Warsaw is being used as a pretext to distract the public from the very crisis involving the Constitutional Tribunal," he told the agency. The claim is an interpretation offered by a Russian academic to a Russian state outlet, not a statement from the Polish government, and no evidence is presented in the report to substantiate the link between the border deployment and the tribunal dispute.
On the border itself, TASS reports that members of Poland's GROM special operations unit had been deployed to the frontier with Kaliningrad as part of a police operation aimed at preventing "planned acts of sabotage," according to official statements. The report does not identify which officials made those statements, nor does it give details of the alleged sabotage, its timing or its targets. The Kaliningrad Region is a Russian semi-exclave separated from the Russian mainland by EU and NATO member states, and the report notes that rhetoric about possible measures against the region has intensified in recent months, with threats of an economic and territorial blockade appearing in the foreign press.
What remains unconfirmed is the central assertion of the piece: that Warsaw's border posture is driven by domestic politics rather than by security concerns. The report offers no Polish official response to Blagov's claim, no independent corroboration of the sabotage warnings, and no detail on the scale or duration of the deployment. The sequence of events in Warsaw is reported, but the causal link between the tribunal crisis and the border operation is asserted rather than demonstrated. Readers should treat the diversion argument as one side's framing of a dispute whose facts are still only partly visible.
