By Jim Geraghty
Monday, May 18, 2026
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 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, 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,” “Ghost
Blizzard,” and “Dragonfly” are all Russian state-sponsored cyberespionage
groups linked to the Russian FSB’s Center 16 Unit.
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, “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. In November, Polish
authorities discovered acts of sabotage 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 a whole bunch of Russian spies and saboteurs, and filed Interpol red notices 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 about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s abrupt decision to cancel 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 “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 “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.”
As Admiral
James Stockdale Asked, ‘Who Am I? Why Am I Here?’
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, 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 when brutal terrorist groups
believe any form of barbaric cruelty is justifiable in pursuit of their goals. In Syria, 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, or lower Manhattan. If you
think deterrence is expensive, wait until you see the cost of inaction.
And speaking of inaction . . .
Rich Americans Blow Off Chinese Threat to Taiwan, Film
at 11
The last time I paid attention to Chamath Palihapitiya, a
Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist who co-hosts the All-In
podcast, was back in 2022, when he declared that he simply didn’t
care about the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs, and went
further, declaring, “Morally virtue-signaling about somebody else’s
human-rights track record is deplorable.” Afterwards, Palihapitiya issued a
statement with the usual, “I’m sorry if anyone was offended, of course I
care about human rights” blah-blah-blah blather.
The All-In podcast features Palihapitiya
(estimated net worth $1.2
billion) and his fellow venture capitalists Jason Calacanis (estimated net
worth at least $120 million), David Sacks (estimated net worth at least $1 billion), and
David Friedberg (estimated net worth around $1.2 billion), and often features guests like Salesforce
CEO Marc Benioff (estimated net worth $9 billion).
In his most recent edition of the All-In podcast,
Palihapitiya declared that the United States government will no longer need to
be as concerned about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan because we’ll soon be able
to make comparable silicon chips:
We’re 18 months
from Taiwan not being an important moment of conversation the way that it is
today. Why 18 months? Because we are at a point where we’re probably one to two
nanometers away from being able to do what we need Taiwan to strategically do
for us. And so, as we scale up our chip fabs [chip fabrication manufacturing
facilities], as we get more capacity and — interestingly, there are these
orthogonal technologies being developed. I don’t know if you guys saw, but
Neuralink was showcasing now a machine that is literally operating at the
almost nanometer scale to do the brain operations for the implantation, all
automatically. So, when you have the dexterity and the capability,
mechanically, to make these things, the real reason then is a very different
one than what it is today. Today it’s economic and if you take that off the
table, I think we’ll have a very different attitude to Taiwan.
We saw this same “defend Taiwan until we’re semiconductor independent”
philosophy from Vivek Ramaswamy, which made me glad that the position of governor of Ohio
doesn’t have much influence over U.S. military policy in the Pacific.
Taiwan is not just a bunch of really advanced microchip factories, although it
has them. It is an independent country (sorry, U.S.
State Department) and a modern, thriving, multiparty democracy with the
rule of law, a free and independent media, freedom of speech, freedom of
assembly, freedom of religion, educational inquiry, and due process. Freedom
House grades Taiwan as a 93 out of a possible 100 in political rights and civil
liberties. (China scored a nine.) There are 23 million people there who
do not deserve to live under the boot of Xi Jinping. And we know the regime of
the People’s Republic of China really hates the Taiwanese because they prove
that the people of China do not need an authoritarian, totalitarian mass
surveillance state to live happy, productive, and sufficiently orderly lives.
The U.S. has been close allies with
Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese government since the 1930s.
(While serving in the U.S. Navy, my dad got to shake hands with then-President
Chiang Kai-shek, and he will eagerly tell the story of their encounter to
anyone willing to listen — and sometimes those who aren’t willing.) We
signed a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in 1954; it was terminated by President Jimmy Carter, but Carter enacted
the Taiwan Relations Act, which stated that it was the policy
of the U.S. to continue arms sales to Taiwan, and to “maintain the capacity of
the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that
would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people
on Taiwan.” The U.S. commitment to deter a Chinese invasion was further
reinforced by Ronald Reagan’s “Six Assurances.”
But let’s say you’re spectacularly ill-informed about
history and don’t think any of that stuff matters. Let’s say you think the U.S.
can send a signal to Xi or one of his successors that if China invades, the
U.S. will stand back and let it happen.
The day China invades Taiwan, the world economy
collapses, and it’s not just because of losing access to Taiwan’s chips
(although the consequences of losing access to Taiwan’s chips will make losing
access to the Persian Gulf’s oil and natural gas look like a picnic). The
Taiwan Strait is one of the busiest maritime routes in the world, with almost
all of Asia dependent upon it as a trade route. Suddenly nobody’s shipping
anything (or they’re taking much longer, much more expensive routes) and
because you figure there’s going to be an air war, no one is flying anywhere near
there, either. Picture no flights out of Asia’s cities for the foreseeable
future.
It is extremely hard to envision China invading Taiwan
and not taking some sort of preemptive attack (kinetic, cyber, sabotage)
against Taiwan’s allies like the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia and
perhaps other regional militaries, to prevent them from defending Taiwan.
Picture the entire Pacific Rim looking like the Strait of Hormuz — very few
ships going in, very few ships going out.
Add it all up, and the economic fallout from an invasion of Taiwan is
projected to be roughly twice as damaging as the Covid-19 pandemic.
Later in the conversation, Marc Benioff chimed in.
Calacanis:
China sets up a blockade around Taiwan, and they decide they’re taking it.
Should the U.S. defend it? Yes or no?
Benioff: I’ve
said this for years. I don’t agree with Niall Ferguson on that point. I think that this is a
nonsense issue. I think China and Taiwan will reconcile.
Whether or not the U.S. should defend Taiwan is a
“nonsense issue”? And I would love to get a better sense of how Benioff
envisions this “reconciliation” to occur. I’m sure the People’s Liberation Army
would define their actions as “reconciliation” as well.
Alas, the conversation steered toward a lot of jokes
about the desire to drill holes into Palihapitiya’s head, and hey, who among
us, right?
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