Szmydt also denounced the Polish authorities for „pushing for conflict with Belarus and Russia under pressure from the UK and the US”. He then accepted a cameo part in the Russo-Belarusianpropaganda circus, appearing on a show with Putin’s most venomous TV star, Vladimir Solovyov.<\/p>\n\n
Szmydt’s defection caused panic in Poland’s United Right. It was during their rule\u00a0(as junior ally to the government of Law and Justice, PiS)\u00a0that Szmydt had roles first at the justice ministry and then in the new, politicised (and so unconstitutional) National Council of the Judiciary, the body that is supposed to uphold the independence of Polish judges.<\/p>\n\n
He was also found to have abetted online attacks on judges who had antagonised the government. He did itdirectly from his perch in the Zbigniew Ziobra-led justice ministry, according to well-sourced media reports. When this „hater scandal” was revealed, Szmydt changed tack and began to use the press \u2013 generally unsympathetic to PiS \u2013 to smear his former government colleagues. That explains why PiS is now seeking to portray him as a „judge of the current regime”.<\/p>\n\n
Unsurprisingly, the current regime is unhappy to have been handed the hot potato of „traitor judge Szmydt”, and is doing its best to remind the public which political camp the judge owed his career to over the past eight years.<\/p>\n\n
Who is Putin’s man?<\/p>\n\n
Neither side of Polish politics \u2013 the government of Civic Coalition (KO, liberal, led by Donald Tusk), or PiS (conservative populist, led de-facto by Jaroslaw Kaczy\u0144ski) \u2013 wants to talk about the Szmydt case. But they also accuse each other of being pro-Russian, of having ties with Russia, and of pushing Putin’s strategic goals. Politics is increasingly turning into a shouting match: „You’re a Russian stooge! No, it’s Tusk who\u2019s the real Russian!”<\/p>\n\n
Tusk, speaking in parliament, attacked Kaczynski’s party for having „paralysed the state services” during his rule,\u00a0thus\u00a0rendering them helpless in the face of cases such as that of Szmydt. „When your civil servants \u2013 because you were in power \u2013 started to understand that something was amiss in the ties between the PiS government and eastern governments […], investigations were cut off”, he claimed.<\/p>\n\n
Tusk also blamed PiS for „disarming the Polish armed forces” and „flooding Poland with Russian coal”, and accused Kaczy\u0144ski of having meetings in the 1990s with KGB agent Anatoly Wasin. Finally, he claimed \u2013 paraphrasing the veteran politician Leszek Moczulski’s words addressed to the post-communist left in the parliament \u2013 that the acronym PiS could be read in a similar way as PZPR (acronym of the former communist ruling party): „paid traitors, lackeys of Russia”.<\/p>\n\n
In response, Mariusz Kaminski, who was minister in charge of the security services in the PiS government, alleged on X-Twitter that Tusk’s government harboured a minister who had long been in the services’ sights because of his ties to Russia.\u00a0For his part, former PiS prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki posted a flurry of crude attacks on Tusk for his links to Putin.\u00a0One<\/a>\u00a0of them shows a photo of Tusk bowing his head and shaking hands with Putin, which Morawiecki captioned with the comment „Did you, too, polish Putin’s shoes?”<\/p>\n\n