I heard the news about Kraków from my daughter, with whom I visited the market square some 10 years ago, so it felt very personal.
On top of my shock, it didn’t make sense: why would a far-right terrorist murder their own people?
So the simplest explanation seemed to be that he was a psychopath acting on individual motives.
But it came after police arrested a knifeman at the Polish Constitutional Court protests on 31 October.
It also came after three stabbing attacks in Polish schools over four days earlier in October.
And Polish police foiled a far-right terrorist plot to bomb a mosque in September.
So my bigger worry is that Kraków was a symptom of a wider social sickness, caused by extremist online content and political hate speech in Poland, which meant there could be more of these ‘lone wolf’ attacks in future.
“This is bound to happen sooner or later if radical sentiments are constantly being fuelled in society,” a Ukrainian friend and former intelligence officer told me, referring to hate speech on X, and by Polish rightwing and far-right parties, the PiS, KKP, and KWiN.
But many of my Polish friends immediately feared the worst scenario: that the Kraków killer, or the others, had been groomed and activated by Russia, as part of its by now well-documented campaign of terrorism and hybrid warfare against Europe, which is designed to break Western support for Ukraine.
“The rate of these incidents is growing exponentially and it’s hard to think they’re not connected,” said one Polish friend and official.
“I don’t have any evidence, but I’ve got a strong gut instinct on this one. Trust me, Andrew, it’s an element of Russian warfare, it’s designed to cause panic, and we’re going to see more of it,” he added.
A second Polish friend said: “We live in crazy times. I suspect ‘someone’ [Russia] put him [the Kraków gunman] up to this.”
And if you think that sounds like our typical Russophobia, then a former Russian intelligence officer I know had the same gut feeling.
“This is just the beginning. There will be more such incidents,” he told me on Sunday (8 November).
We can’t a priori or cui bono attribute every train crash, riot, or political murder in Europe to Russia, even if it does exploit them all to harm us.
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