Russia’s Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper recently published an article by Aleksandr Shlyapnikov titled “Poland recruits locals for 'Ukrainian' Leopard tank crews.” It read:
“Polish authorities are trying to recruit local residents to crew the German Leopard tanks supplied to Ukraine. Propaganda advocating this is being placed in public places in Polish cities.
“Defend native Polish lands. Join a tank crew. Defend Poland in Ukraine,” reads the appeal on posters in the Polish subway.
“I don't even know what's more beautiful about this. The fact that Polish volunteers are again being recruited so as not to bother with the training of Ukrainian crews or the political context of the posters, which fully demonstrates Warsaw's imperial ambitions,” commented war correspondent Alexander Simonov.
Website Lenta.ru ran the same story, while the Belarusian publishing house Belarus Segodnya (“Belarus Today”) posted a short video of the posters in the Warsaw metro on its YouTube channel.
The information first appeared in the Telegram channel Callsign Bruce, authored by so-called “war correspondent” Alexander Simonov. The post also featured a video clip taken at Warsaw's Centrum metro station.
The poster in the video has the same style as the Zostań Żołnierzem Rzeczypospolitej (“Become a Soldier of the Republic”) advertising campaign, which was launched in 2018, but without the logo in the original posters in the upper corner.
Authentic posters of the “Become a Soldier of the Republic" campaign
“Zostań Żołnierzem Rzeczypospolitej” is a campaign advocating enlistment for contract service in the Polish army, which has nothing to do with recruiting volunteers for foreign formations. A poster with an image of a tank and a call to “defend the native Polish lands” in Ukraine simply doesn’t exist.
In Simonov's video, a promotional poster for Tess Gerritsen's book “The Secret I Will Not Reveal” (”Sekret, którego nie zdradzę”) can be seen next to the next to the poster allegedly calling to “defend Poland in Ukraine.”
Cover of Tess Gerritsen's “The Secret I Will Not Reveal”
A Polish translation of the novel was published by Albatros in October 2017. The video at the subway station appears to have been shot at the same time, with the fake poster with the call to fight in Ukraine pasted into the video during the edit.