On the menu today: Late last year, hackers nearly took down a significant chunk of Poland's power grid - and my guess is you heard nothing about it. Meanwhile, the Pentagon makes a last-minute cancellation of a rotation of 4,000 U.S. troops into Poland. A few words on why I gallivant to these far-flung places and report from them. And a couple of wealthy guys think the U.S. won't need to worry about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan soon. Read on.
Don't Leave Poland in the Lurch
Warsaw, Poland - The good news is that the large-scale Russian cyberattack against Poland's energy infrastructure at the end of last year was stopped by firewalls and other cyber defenses.
The bad news, as Poland's Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Bosacki (
https://www.gov.pl/web/dyplomacja/marcin-bosacki)tells me, is that the threat from that attack was "very, very serious" - he put a lot of emphasis on that second "very" - and had it succeeded, it would have knocked out electricity and heat for large portions of Poland during the middle of winter for God knows how long.
According to the after-action report from Poland's Ministry of Digital Affairs,(
https://cert.pl/uploads/docs/CERT_Polska_Energy_Sector_Incident_Report
_2025.pdf) the attack was directed at "more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a private company from the manufacturing sector, and a large, combined heat and power plant supplying heat to almost half a million customers in Poland." The report continued:
All of the attacks were purely destructive in nature - by analogy to the physical world, they can be compared to deliberate acts of arson. It is worth noting that this period coincided with low temperatures and snowstorms affecting Poland, shortly before New Year's Eve. Based on technical analysis, it can be concluded that all of the aforementioned attacks were carried out by the same threat actor.
Analysis of the infrastructure used in the attack - including compromised VPS servers, routers, traffic patterns, and characteristics of anonymizing infrastructure - shows a high degree of overlap with the infrastructure used by the activity cluster publicly known as "Static Tundra" (Cisco), "Berserk Bear" (CrowdStrike), "Ghost Blizzard" (Microsoft), and "Dragonfly" (Symantec).
"Static Tundra," "Berserk Bear,(
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/adversaries/berserk-bear/)" "Ghost Blizzard,(
https://threatcodex.com/?search=Ghost%20Blizzard)" and "Dragonfly"(
https://attack.mitre.org/groups/G0035/) are all Russian state-sponsored cyberespionage groups linked to the Russian FSB's Center 16 Unit.(
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/07/19/secondhand-medals-rev
eal-the-existence-of-russian-intelligence-cyber-units_6743508_13.html)
The other bad wrinkle to this is that I suspect that this is the first you've heard of this attempted large-scale cyberattack. "Russia tries to take down Poland's power grid and fails" is not nearly as big news internationally as "Russia tries to take down Poland's power grid and succeeds." But the fact that Russia didn't succeed means that the rest of the world barely noticed their attack on Poland's energy infrastructure. And global inattention isn't much of a form of deterrence.
Poland and the rest of NATO are not in a declared war against Russia, but that doesn't mean they're really at peace with Russia, either.
In May 2024, a major shopping center in Warsaw burned to the ground; a year later, the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk declared,(
https://x.com/donaldtusk/status/1921629800730382832) "We now know for sure that the great fire of the Marywilska shopping centre in Warsaw was caused by arson ordered by the Russian special services. Some of the perpetrators have already been detained, all the others are identified and searched for. We will get you all!" In September, Russia "accidentally" flew 19 drones into Polish airspace.(
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/russias-poland-incursion-was-n
o-drone-accident/) In November, Polish authorities discovered acts of sabotage (
https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/12/18/interpol-issues-red-notices-for-russian
-rail-sabotage-suspects-wanted-by-poland/)on two sections of a rail line running between Warsaw and the eastern Polish city of Lublin, including a detonated explosive device that was attempting to cause a derailment.
Poland has arrested (
https://www.euronews.com/2025/10/21/poland-detains-eight-over-suspected-russia
-linked-sabotage-says-pm-tusk)a whole bunch of Russian spies and saboteurs,(
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/57241) and filed Interpol red notices (
https://www.euronews.com/2025/12/02/poland-charges-russian-man-with-directing-
sabotage-and-spying-from-moscow-region)for other perpetrators. But if Russia continues to pursue its "gray zone" tactics against the countries on NATO's eastern flank without significant retaliatory consequences, it's just a matter of time before a whole bunch of innocent civilians get killed.
This seems like a less-than-ideal time for the U.S. to send a signal of nonsupport to Poland, doesn't it?
Our Andrew Stuttaford covers the world, but he really knows eastern Europe, so I wasn't surprised he had already written (
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kickng-an-ally/)about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's abrupt decision to cancel (
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2026/05/13/us-army-abruptly-cancels-d
eployment-of-4000-soldiers-to-poland/)the deployment of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division - more than 4,000 soldiers and associated equipment - to Poland. CNN reported Hegseth (
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/14/politics/us-military-troop-numbers-europe-t
rump)"also cancelled the future deployment to Germany of a battalion that specializes in firing long-range rockets and missiles." Andrew calls these decisions "nuts" and points out that with a significant portion of the U.S. military currently tied down in dealing with Iran, both our allies and our enemies are watching to see how reliable an ally we can be at this moment.
Fourteen months ago, Hegseth called Poland (
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/greetings-from-the-model-nato-
ally/)"a model NATO ally - leading on defense spending, deterrence, and readiness."
What changed? It's understandable that President Trump would be irked with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's statement that the U.S. was being "humiliated" by Iran but A) that has nothing to do with Poland and B) snotty and unhelpful as it was, that statement really was not the worst thing that any German chancellor has ever done. It's a high bar just to crack the top 100 on that list.
Asked about the Pentagon's decision, Deputy Foreign Minister Bosacki walked that fine line between communicating frustration and being careful to not exacerbate tensions. He said the decision "should have been communicated better." He noted that the first report of the decision was in the publication Army Times and "two days later, it becomes official." He described the U.S. communication of the decision to Poland as "not to the golden standard."
I'm out here because I care about the little democracies that in many cases have been steadfast U.S. allies for decades, that are threatened militarily and otherwise by larger, hostile autocracies like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. In Ukraine,(
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/06/what-ukraine-needs/) we've seen what happens when some dictator looks at a spot on the map and declares, "That's mine now, and I'll kill anyone who tries to stop me." In Israel, we've seen what happens (
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/memorializing-october-7/)when brutal terrorist groups believe any form of barbaric cruelty is justifiable in pursuit of their goals. In Syria,(
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/05/syria-after-assad/) we've seen what happens when a dictator believes he's justified in using any measure to keep power.
I am stunned by the number of Americans who can talk themselves into believing "that's not our problem," as if previous seemingly far-off threats have not decided to become our problem in places like Pearl Harbor or the U.S. embassy in Tehran or over the skies of Lockerbie, Scotland,(
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/us/politics/masud-pan-am-bombing-l
ibya-fbi.html) or lower Manhattan. If you think deterrence is expensive, wait until you see the cost of inaction.
SOURCE:
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-large-scale-near-miss-cyber
attack-you-never-heard-about/(
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/t he-large-scale-near-miss-cyberattack-you-never-heard-about/)
... My tagline could eat your tagline for breakfast
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