You don't have to like Leszek Kraskowski. You can disbelieve every one of his investigations, you can think him a troublemaker and a lone wolf who got himself into this mess. You're free to think that way – and today it doesn't matter in the slightest. Because the court in Piaseczno has handed this investigative journalist three months of pre-trial detention, the harshest sanction it had available at all. So I'm not asking whether the editor is guilty. I'm asking what tool was reached for to go after him.
What we were sold, and what doesn't add up.
First came a simple, reassuring story put into circulation: the editor was detained out of concern for safety – his own, that of the local police chief, and that of the chief's family. Then we read the charges in full: illegal possession of a firearm – specifically a gas pistol with ammunition – and sending the police chief an email containing a criminal threat. It only sounds menacing until you start reading the details. The family matters used to prop up the detention motion had, after all, been concluded several months earlier, and were dredged up again precisely to fit this arrest.
The pistol, the email, and the inconvenient questions.
Take the weapon. A blank-firing pistol chambered for gas ammunition is an item you can buy in the Czech Republic, in Italy, or across most of Europe without any permit whatsoever; Polish law requires it to be registered only above a certain calibre, and it is on this technical distinction that the entire "offence" rests. And now the context the official narrative passes over in silence: for weeks the editor had been living with a sense of genuine danger. As his defence recounts, he survived a knife attack and shots fired in his direction, reported it to the police again and again, and again and again nothing came of it. Only then did he write online the sentence now being turned against him: if the state cannot protect him, should he take matters into his own hands?
Then there is the email itself. His defence points to a detail that ought to set off alarm bells for anyone: the threat supposedly came from a freshly created ProtonMail account signed with the editor's full name, even though he himself corresponded with the police from an ordinary Gmail address. Prosecutors see it differently and lay out the leads that, in their view, point to the journalist. But there is as yet no court to settle this riddle – and that is precisely why we must not prejudge guilt either way. What we may do is ask about proportionality.
Proportionality
Because even a repeat offender, a man already convicted, who threatens someone, is usually given a restraining order by the court, not detention. Pre-trial detention is a measure of last resort, the harshest in the entire range at a court's disposal. And it is not only a commentator with particular views saying so. The Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsman) has reminded us that the overuse of pre-trial detention is a systemic problem in Poland, and that cases involving journalists call for particular caution and public justification. Press Club Polska spoke outright of a violation of the right to a defence. This is not the language of an opposition militia – it is the language of the institutions established to safeguard standards.
The procedure
The second jarring note is the procedure. The editor named his own defence counsel – and that choice was ignored, with a court-appointed lawyer assigned to him instead. His counsel, as the defence argues, had no access to the case files, learned of the detention hearing only a few minutes before it began, and was not present during the search of the apartment. Each of these elements taken on its own can be explained away by haste. Together they form a picture in which the right to a defence has become a formality. And it is this picture, not the charge itself, that makes me repeat the sentence I said live: that all of this is starting to resemble Belarus far too closely.
This is not a new mechanism.
I have a duty, however, to say something that part of my audience will not like: this mechanism was not born yesterday, and it has no single party colour. In June 2014, officers of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) entered the newsroom of Wprost and tried to seize the editor-in-chief's laptop containing the recordings from the tape (wiretap) scandal; the journalists defended the equipment with their bare hands. This happened under the government of Donald Tusk. That same week, Monika Olejnik told the prime minister to his face that the entire journalistic community was against him, and all he replied was: "Yes, I've noticed that." The apparatus of the state turned against a newsroom does not ask who happens to be in power. That is why we must not let ourselves grow comfortable with it when our own side reaches for it – because tomorrow someone else will use that very same tool.
The paradox they didn't foresee.
There is a paradox in this story that ought to keep the people who planned this detention awake at night. Kraskowski made his name digging into the so-called Polnord affair – a thread that runs through the name of Roman Giertych, today a coalition MP. Let me be perfectly clear: the proceedings against Giertych himself were discontinued in early 2025, he denies the allegations, and I will police that line firmly. But the very arrest of the journalist has given his material a second life – people are once again opening up that old story and asking questions that had already begun to fade. They wanted to close the subject, and instead they reopened it. And let me add something I say without a shred of partisan satisfaction: this case largely drags on from the days of the PiS government, which failed to deal with it too. It really is above party divisions – and that is exactly why trying to shut it down with an arrest is so short-sighted.
A cool-headed look
The question asked most often today is this: is this Belarus already? Looking at it coolly – not yet. In this year's Reporters Without Borders press freedom ranking, Poland climbed to twenty-seventh place in the world, up four spots; from Belarus, from the regime-ridden bottom of that list, we are light years away. What is more, it was Poland that, at the end of April, extracted Andrzej Poczobut from a Belarusian prison. And that is why this one case stings doubly: a state that pulls a journalist out of a cell at Lukashenko's hands allows its own court, six weeks later, to send another to detention over an email. So I am not claiming that we are Belarus. I am claiming that the direction in which a state is heading is shown not by its declarations, but by the tools it allows itself to reach for. Three months' detention for a journalist, with his counsel pushed aside and his equipment – and with it his sources – confiscated, is precisely such a tool. The healthiest thing in all of this is the instinct of those who genuinely cannot stand Kraskowski and yet stood up in his defence: the Gazeta Wyborcza commentator Wojciech Czuchnowski offered to post bail for him. This is exactly the line that must be defended before it is crossed, not mourned after the fact.
As to the facts: the statements from the District Court and the District Prosecutor's Office in Piaseczno were quoted by PAP, Rzeczpospolita and TVN24; positions were taken by the Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsman), the Association of Polish Journalists and Press Club Polska; Poland's place in this year's press freedom ranking was given by Reporters Without Borders; the release of Andrzej Poczobut in late April 2026 was reported by media on both sides of the dispute. The judgement of this case remains mine.
