by Marcin Romanowski, PhD, LL.M. (Regensburg, Germany)
Polish MP in Exile in Hungary, Director of the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom
At the end of August 2025, the Military Affairs Division of the Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment before the Warsaw District Court against the former Minister of National Defence, now Member of the Sejm of the Republic of Poland and chairman of the parliamentary group of the largest opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), Mariusz Błaszczak; against the former Director of the Military Historical Bureau and current Head of the National Security Bureau at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, Professor Sławomir Cenckiewicz; as well as against two former officials of the Ministry of Defence.[1] The Prosecutor’s Office charged them with disclosing fragments of military planning documents—the so-called “Defense Plan on the Vistula line.” These were contingency plans in the event of a Russian attack, which foresaw significant defensive action only along the Vistula River—effectively conceding the entire eastern half of the country.
Through proceedings against Professor Cenckiewicz, Donald Tusk seeks to weaken President Karol Nawrocki by targeting one of his closest advisers and collaborators. At the same time, he continues to weaponize state institutions against the Law and Justice party by prosecuting the current leader of its parliamentary caucus and one of Jarosław Kaczyński’s closest associates.
Since December 2023, Poland has been living under the conditions of a liberal autocracy, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk himself calls “militant democracy.” Numerous state institutions have been unlawfully and forcibly seized, including public media, the prosecution service, and a number of courts—above all the Warsaw District Court, where politically sensitive cases are concentrated. The activity of constitutional bodies independent of the left-liberal ruling coalition has been blocked, or their judgments completely ignored, as in the case of the Constitutional Court, whose rulings have not been published or enforced by Tusk’s administration for over a year.[2] All of this serves one purpose: to eliminate from public life those politicians, experts, and social leaders who pose a threat to the left-liberal establishment and its network of influence.
The timing of the initiation of proceedings against Błaszczak and Cenckiewicz, the nature of the charges, and the manner of their communication clearly reveal that this is another political witch-hunt against conservatives whose determination and activity have proven that they represent a serious threat to globalist elites, so often intertwined with Poland’s post-communist nomenklatura. The case itself accelerated during the presidential campaign. Błaszczak was charged in March,[3] his officials in April,[4] and Cenckiewicz—closely cooperating with Karol Nawrocki—was charged in May 2025,[5] ten days before the first round of the presidential elections. The indictment then coincided with Cenckiewicz’s nomination as head of the National Security Bureau by the newly elected President Nawrocki. It is difficult to avoid the impression that this was intended to pressure the President not to appoint him. For Cenckiewicz, like the President himself, is a heavy-caliber weapon: a distinguished historian, head of the military archives under PiS governments, engaged earlier in cleansing the security services of communist apparatchiks. He authored a publication exposing Lech Wałęsa’s collaboration with the communist Security Service in the 1970s, for which Wałęsa allegedly received payment—and Cenckiewicz prevailed against Wałęsa in court. He is also co-author, together with Michał Rachoń of TV Republika, of the highly popular documentary film series and book Reset, which exposed the Russian entanglements of Tusk’s and Sikorski’s team between 2007 and 2015. The charges against him are directly linked to this publication.
President Nawrocki himself, as head of the Institute of National Remembrance, demonstrated extraordinary determination in removing communist and Soviet legacies. For his consistent program of dismantling Soviet monuments, Putin’s regime issued a warrant for his arrest. Under his presidency, the investigative division of the Institute was mobilized to pursue communist crimes more actively, including those committed by prosecutors and judges. This aroused fear among post-communist elites in the judiciary and security services—and fueled a desire for his elimination.
The political nature of the present case becomes most evident in the charges themselves. The Prosecutor’s Office accuses Mariusz Błaszczak of having, at the end of July 2023, as Minister of National Defence, exceeded his powers in order to obtain personal benefits for the Law and Justice party. The alleged act consisted of lifting the “Top Secret” and “Secret” classifications from fragments of strategic-level operational planning documents, including the “Operational Plan for the Use of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland WARTA-00101 – Independent Defensive Operation, Main Part” as well as the 2015 Political-Strategic Defence Directive of the Republic of Poland.
According to the prosecutors, the supposed “personal benefit” lay in using selected fragments of these documents—taken out of context—to discredit political opponents and thereby act in favor of his political formation, i.e., the Law and Justice party and its electoral committee. In their view, the disclosure violated the Law on the Protection of Classified Information and fulfilled the elements of Article 231 of the Criminal Code (abuse of powers to the detriment of the public interest and for personal benefit) and Article 265 of the Criminal Code (disclosure of a state secret). Since the declassified planning documents were originally subject to the highest classification levels and contained information concerning Poland’s defensive strategy and key aspects of national security, the prosecutors claim that Błaszczak lifted the secrecy without substantive justification. In their assessment, this harmed Poland’s internal and external security, political stability, public trust, and international standing.
Professor Sławomir Cenckiewicz, at that time Director of the Military Historical Bureau, was charged with aiding and abetting. The Prosecutor’s Office further alleges that he exceeded his powers in order to obtain personal benefit for Błaszczak and for himself, since the declassified materials were later used in the documentary series Reset, of which he was the author and, in their words, the primary beneficiary. The prosecutors contend that without the actions and initiative of these individuals, there would have been no declassification or subsequent disclosure of the strategic-level operational planning documents.
Yet the decision to declassify the materials was issued in proper legal form by the competent authority—the Minister of National Defence. It is untenable to speak of an “illegal” lifting of secrecy when the duly empowered authority issued administrative decisions to that effect, with the assessment of grounds resting within his competence. The documents in question had already been archived. The Prosecutor’s Office, by insisting that protection requirements continued, effectively usurps the role of an administrative authority—something for which it has neither power nor competence. Nor can any damage be demonstrated, since the materials were devoid of operational value. The claim that national defense was endangered is political rhetoric, not fact. Even more grotesque is the assertion that the accused obtained a “personal benefit” in the form of political or media capital.
By presuming to review and overturn, ex post, a discretionary administrative decision of the competent minister, the prosecution lays bare its political pretext. This is not the first time that the Prosecutor’s Office has stretched the interpretation of public law contra legem, only to shoehorn inconvenient actions into the criminal law framework of “abuse of powers” under Article 231. The same pattern was visible in the politically motivated Justice Fund case: fabricated charges of abuse of powers despite fully lawful administrative discretion, and the absurd identification of “personal benefit” with the satisfaction of supporting conservative or Christian projects.
The fundamental question is whether the Prosecutor’s Office can retroactively undermine the validity of a ministerial decision simply because it disagrees with the grounds. Such an approach destroys the logic of administrative law, undermines the functioning of state organs, and converts criminal procedure into a tool of political combat.
Particularly indefensible is the charge of disclosing a state secret under Article 265, for once information has been lawfully declassified, it no longer falls within the protective scope of that provision.
Equally scandalous is the attempt to impute to Professor Cenckiewicz—who was at the time performing his official duties at the Military Historical Bureau—“aiding and abetting” disclosure of state secrets. Aiding and abetting, in criminal law, requires conscious, active facilitation of a prohibited act, not the routine performance of professional archival or historical duties. The entire matter concerns historical materials, not current defense plans.
Paradoxically, in its own public statements, the Prosecutor’s Office concedes that Mariusz Błaszczak disclosed only fragments—allegedly “taken out of context”—which he interpreted to show that the then-ruling authorities did not intend to defend Poland from the outset of an enemy’s aggression but only after the eastern half of the country had been overrun, i.e., along the Vistula line. According to the prosecution, such an interpretation could not be drawn from a holistic reading of the above-mentioned strategic-level operational planning documents. By disputing the conclusions Błaszczak drew from the disclosed fragments, the prosecution implicitly undermines its own thesis of harm to the public interest (which in any event could not have been infringed, given the archival character of the documents—still less by the disclosure of only small excerpts).
It is also striking that in its lengthy communiqués issued at successive stages of the case, the Prosecutor’s Office has publicly revealed more information—information which it simultaneously claims remained unlawfully and therefore ineffectively declassified—than the defendants themselves ever disclosed in their statements.
Moreover, the Prosecutor’s Office has ventured into overtly political assessments in its communications, positioning itself, in substance, as an actor aligned with one side of an ongoing political dispute. This further exposes the true intent of the investigators and of the Tusk administration in their actions against Błaszczak and Cenckiewicz: political retribution. The exposure of “Tusk’s line of shame” in the 2023 campaign was a significant blow to his camp, laying bare its real intentions toward Eastern Poland—a region markedly more conservative, and one systematically marginalized in infrastructure funding under left-liberal governments. The declassification of defense plans dating from Tusk’s tenure merely confirmed to residents of those provinces that globalists regard them as second-class citizens.
Equally central to understanding the motive for this punitive campaign is Professor Cenckiewicz’s role as a scholar of Soviet and Russian influence in Poland. His academic record, his resolve, and his readiness to apply documented findings make him particularly threatening to Tusk and Sikorski. President Karol Nawrocki captured this succinctly when he observed that those who should be in the dock are the politicians who sought to hand over half of Poland to barbarians and oppressors—not Professor Cenckiewicz, who documented that betrayal. In reality, Cenckiewicz not only broke no law and did not act to the detriment of the public interest; on the contrary, he acted in the interest of national security. The attacks on him are, in essence, attacks on the President himself and on the Polish raison d’état. A patriot and a scholar who has fought Russian influence for years, Cenckiewicz has thus become the “public enemy number one” for the camps of Tusk and Sikorski—men who, in practice, advanced Russian interests in Poland.
Attention must also be drawn to the procedural and institutional context, which indicates that in politically motivated cases—and this case clearly falls into that category—there is no guarantee of access to an impartial forum.
First, the case is to be adjudicated by the Warsaw District Court, one of the courts in which the leadership was installed unlawfully. In July 2024, acting as Minister of Justice, Adam Bodnar curtailed—contrary to statute, to an interim protective order, and to a ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal—the terms of office of the president and vice-presidents of the District Court and of numerous Warsaw regional courts, in order to replace the unlawfully dismissed office holders with loyal nominees.
The core violation lay in unlawfully truncating fixed four- and six-year terms despite the statute’s clear terms. The Minister disregarded negative opinions of court collegia and of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS) and manipulated the composition of collegia by introducing unauthorized members. Ultimately, the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of 16 October 2024 (K 2/24) held unconstitutional those provisions insofar as they allowed the Minister of Justice to effectively exclude the KRS from the procedure for dismissing court presidents and to suspend members of court leadership indefinitely from official duties.[6] The Minister of Justice has not complied with that ruling.
In addition, the Minister and many of his appointees in court leadership deny the Council’s statutory competence to consent to a judge’s continued adjudication after reaching retirement age. In the Warsaw District Court, this concerns the court’s very president, who—contrary to clear statutory language—did not seek such consent from the National Council of the Judiciary but instead sought it from the Minister of Justice, for which there is no legal basis. As a result, she continues to serve as court president and continues to adjudicate despite no longer being a sitting judge. This is not an isolated instance; in analogous matters, the Supreme Court has already issued judgments declaring absolute nullity of decisions rendered with the participation of persons who are not judges.[7]
These unlawful changes in Warsaw court leadership were followed by purges preparing the courts for political persecution of the opposition. In particular, within the Warsaw District Court, a special criminal division was created, composed of judges appointed after 2017 with the participation of the current National Council of the Judiciary—judges independent of the Minister’s political directives—who were assigned matters of lesser importance, whereas critical criminal cases and those concerning pre-trial detention are adjudicated exclusively by judges appointed before 2017, often during the communist period. The new division is headed by Judge Piotr Gąciarek, one of the most politically engaged judges in Poland.
Additionally, the Minister of Justice has delegated to criminal divisions judges sympathetic to the current government, effectively dismantling the random case assignment system introduced by the PiS government in 2017. That system was designed to curb the practice of “stacking” panels by court presidents or division heads. In light of the Minister’s unlawful interventions, which enabled manipulation of internal court structures, the system no longer fulfils its function—particularly where “cleansed” divisions, stripped of judges who might resist political pressure (because they were appointed outside the pre-2017 corporatist system), are then staffed by loyal delegates. These delegated judges, with fewer pre-existing caseloads, have a significantly higher probability of being “randomly” assigned to new proceedings. Such manipulation occurred, for example, in the “random” assignment of the judge in the criminal case concerning the Justice Fund. After the indictment against six individuals was filed with the Warsaw District Court in January 2025, the Minister of Justice simultaneously delegated new judges to the division, with the result that the case was assigned to one of the delegated judges.
To this must be added that since January 2024, the prosecution service has been headed by an unlawfully installed National Public Prosecutor—the First Deputy to the Prosecutor General—whose illegality has been recognized by both the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Tribunal. The lawful National Public Prosecutor was physically barred from entering the National Prosecutor’s Office building.[8] Consequently, the heads of territorial and organizational units appointed by this usurper hold office without proper authority. At the same time, deputy prosecutors general who displayed independence from the Prosecutor General’s political and unlawful directives were suspended. Prosecutor Tomasz Janeczek, the Deputy Prosecutor General for Military Affairs, was also subjected to reprisals: though not formally suspended, he was stripped of supervisory authority over virtually all matters and, in particular, was excluded from supervising the case against Błaszczak and Cenckiewicz.
This anarchy, illegality, and administrative chaos introduced into the justice system by the Minister of Justice–Prosecutor General is especially visible in politically sensitive cases.
In the proceedings against Błaszczak and Cenckiewicz, the standard of prosecutorial impartiality has also been violated. The case is being conducted by military prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Marcin Maksjan. Under the impartiality standard enshrined in Article 41 §1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (in conjunction with Article 47), a series of circumstances must be noted which—taken together or individually—give rise to justified doubts as to his impartiality in this matter.[9]
First, there is a significant family and historical context. The prosecutor’s father, Wiesław Maksjan, served during the communist regime in units subordinate to the Second Directorate of the General Staff, and later in the Military Intelligence Services (WSI), the successor to the communist military services. He was also lawfully adjudged to be a lustration liar (judgment of the Białystok District Court of 12 February 2020, upheld by the Białystok Court of Appeal on 6 July 2020). This is an objectively sensitive element in a case where one of the defendants is Sławomir Cenckiewicz—a historian long engaged in exposing and criticizing the legacy of the WSI and its networks. It was Cenckiewicz who, in 2006, chaired the Commission for the Liquidation of the WSI. The juxtaposition of these facts—the family ties of the prosecutor to the Second Directorate/WSI and Cenckiewicz’s role in their dismantling—creates a clear plane of perceived conflict that raises serious doubts about the impartiality of the public accuser.
Second, doubts arise from Lieutenant Colonel Maksjan’s role in the investigation of the Smolensk air disaster. In 2011, he was delegated to the Warsaw Military District Prosecutor’s Office and joined the team investigating the crash of the Tu-154M, in which President Lech Kaczyński and nearly 100 members of his delegation perished. Maksjan simultaneously served as spokesman (deputy spokesman) of the National Military Prosecutor’s Office, repeatedly communicating the findings of the investigation to the media. This dual function—as both a member of the investigative team and a public communicator in one of the most politically charged cases of the past decades—cemented his recognizable profile and his association with a particular mode of narrative in matters of the highest political sensitivity. This inevitably bears on the perception of his impartiality in the present case, which also has a clear political dimension.
Third, Maksjan’s public statements in the current proceedings create the impression of prejudgment. In March 2025, he explicitly declared that “there were no substantive grounds for lifting the classification” of the disclosed materials, thereby imposing a categorical interpretative frame on the case even before judicial adjudication. In proceedings of a strongly political nature, such categorical pronouncements by the prosecuting authority exacerbate the objective risk of partiality in the sense of Article 41 §1 of the Code.
It must also be stressed that the substantive core of this dispute relates directly to the professional work of Sławomir Cenckiewicz, both as chairman of the Commission for the Liquidation of the Military Intelligence Services and later as Director of the Military Historical Bureau (2016–2023). He has emerged as one of the most prominent figures in the process of holding accountable the military and security apparatus of the Polish communist state, as well as its successor, the Military Intelligence Services (WSI). This specific biography—confronted with the lustration-verified family background of the prosecutor—reinforces the objective necessity of recusal in order to preserve public trust in the impartiality of the justice system.
Despite the clear fulfilment of the statutory criterion—“circumstances of such a kind as to raise justified doubts about impartiality” within the meaning of Article 41 §1 in conjunction with Article 47—and despite a formal motion to that effect by Professor Cenckiewicz, Prosecutor Maksjan was not recused from the case.
Meanwhile, senior representatives of the administration, led by Prime Minister Tusk, in less than two years have committed a series of unlawful acts and grave violations against the constitutional organs of the state. In consequence, loss of power would mean long prison terms. This explains the increasingly frantic persecution of the opposition: it is a race against time, as Tusk’s grip on power in Poland steadily erodes. With the defeat of the ruling camp’s candidate, Rafał Trzaskowski—closely linked to the Soros network—in the 2025 presidential election, the government has suffered both social and legal delegitimization. While the coalition parties together secured in 2023 over half the seats in parliament, sufficient to form a government, they lack the three-fifths majority in the Sejm required to override presidential vetoes. Under the Constitution, the President may veto any statute (save for the budget), and without three-fifths support, such vetoes cannot be overridden. This means that, given the presidency is now held by a conservative, the mandate of Tusk’s coalition is partial, provisional, and conditional. The 2025 presidential election was intended as the final transfer of power to Tusk. Instead, the Polish people delivered him a red card. This occurred despite the mobilization of the entire apparatus of the state in support of the liberal candidate—including unlawful acts such as the blocking of public financing for PiS in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, censorship measures directed against independent media, and the full deployment of the illegally captured Prosecutor’s Office, one of whose principal assignments has been the prosecution of conservative opposition politicians on fabricated charges.[10] The proceedings against Błaszczak and Cenckiewicz are but one of many examples.
[1] https://www.gov.pl/web/po-warszawa/komunikat-w-sprawie-aktu-oskarzenia-przeciwko-bylemu-ministrowi-obrony-narodowej-oraz-szefowi-biura-bezpieczenstwa-narodowego-i-innym-osobom-w-sledztwie-dotyczacym-ujawnienia-fragmentow-planu-uzycia-sil-zbrojnych-rp-warta (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[2] https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2025/08/01/eu-legal-hypocrisy-in-weaponizing-the-rule-of-law/ (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[3] https://www.gov.pl/web/po-warszawa/zarzut-przekroczenia-uprawnien-przez-bylego-ministra-obrony-narodowej (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[4] https://www.gov.pl/web/po-warszawa/kolejni-podejrzani-w-sledztwie-dotyczacym-ujawnienia-fragmentow-wojskowego-planu-obronnego-polski-warta (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[5] https://www.gov.pl/web/po-warszawa/zarzuty-dla-bylego-dyrektora-wojskowego-biura-historycznego-w-zwiazku-z-pomocnictwem-w-ujawnieniem-fragmentow-planu-uzycia-sil-zbrojnych-rzeczypospolitej-polskiej (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[6] https://trybunal.gov.pl/postepowanie-i-orzeczenia/komunikaty-prasowe/komunikaty-po/art/procedura-odwolania-prezesa-lub-wiceprezesa-sadu-1 (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[7] cf. e.g.: https://www.sn.pl/sites/orzecznictwo/Orzeczenia3/III%20KK%20295-25.pdf (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[8] https://www.iwp.edu/articles/2025/05/28/weaponizing-justice-the-unlawful-takeover-of-polands-prosecution-service-by-the-left-liberal-government-of-donald-tusk/ (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[9] https://niezalezna.pl/polska/syn-podoficera-wsi-msci-sie-na-cenckiewiczu-i-blaszczaku-to-znany-prokurator/537219 (accessed: 31 August 2025).
[10] https://alapjogokert.hu/static/pdf/MLSZI-Riport-ENG.pdf (accessed: 31 August 2025).