When Poland’s centrist government sent the riot police late on Friday to seal off the country’s Constitutional Tribunal amid a long standoff over control of the court, its right-wing enemies accused it of staging a criminal “coup d’état.”
Now, Russia has jumped in, too, fanning claims of a putsch by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and amplifying attacks on Poland’s pro-European government by hard-right politicians at home and abroad.
Mr. Tusk, long reviled by Moscow because of his strong support for Ukraine, sent police officers to the court after right-wing protesters gathered outside to denounce the suspension of its chief justice, an ally of Poland’s former governing party, Law and Justice.
Dmitri Medvedev, a former Russian president who is now vice chairman of the Kremlin’s security council and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, declared on Sunday that “a constitutional coup is underway in Poland.”
Claims of a coup at the Constitutional Tribunal, the focus of a decade-long political struggle over the Polish judiciary, have dominated attacks in recent days on Mr. Tusk by his right-wing enemies at home and Kremlin-friendly European politicians like Marine Le Pen of France, Nigel Farage of Britain and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands.
Right-wing allies of the suspended chief justice, Bogdan Swieczkowski, who over the weekend still controlled the tribunal’s social media account, accused their rivals of “committing the crime” of a putsch, a charge quickly taken up by a swarm of commentators on X, Telegram and internet bulletin boards.
Referring in a speech over the weekend to often false claims on social media of violence and police brutality at the court, Mr. Tusk said, “They are using an army of Russian bots on the internet.”
Russia and Europe’s E.U.-skeptic hard right seem eager to inflame Polish tensions in the hope of weakening Poland’s staunchly pro-Ukraine and pro-European Union government at a time when Moscow is working hard to undermine Europe’s support for Ukraine.
Those efforts suffered setbacks with the election defeat in April of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, a longtime opponent of helping Ukraine; and of Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s longtime leader, on Oct. 25. Mr. Vucic had resisted imposing sanctions on Russia and met regularly with Mr. Putin, even as he turned a blind eye to the sale of large quantities of Serbian weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.
The victors in Serbia’s recent election, a largely leaderless and diverse new movement called Student List, Students Win, say there will be no sharp turn away from friendly relations with Russia. But in a sign that the mood in Belgrade may be shifting, the Serbian Central Bank announced on Saturday that it was shutting down Alta Bank, a lender that Russian citizens and companies had used to transfer funds to and from Russia.
The prosecutor’s office for organized crime said on Monday it had arrested the bank’s Croatia-born Serbian owner and two executives in connection with an investigation into the illegal removal of nearly $400 million from the bank’s vault.
Poland stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Serbia in relation to Russia and has been a frequent target of abuse, disinformation campaigns and sabotage operations by Moscow.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, said on Sunday in a lengthy post on Telegram that Poland faced “collapse and tragedy” akin to the 2014 political crisis in Ukraine that led to the downfall of President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Mr. Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 after months of street protests against him in Kyiv, opening the way for a new government that Russia immediately denounced as dominated by Nazi nationalists, a false claim used by Mr. Putin to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Mr. Tusk’s government, the foreign ministry spokeswoman said, was struggling “to steer away from a bloody downward spiral and back into a legal framework.”
