A protest in Třinec is being convened by a person who does not exist. A campaign inflated an old border dispute into a crisis over Zaolzie

On Saturday, August 29, the Facebook profile “Adam Sikora” is calling a demonstration in Třinec under the slogans “Cieszyn Silesia is Czech” and “We live here, we stay here”. The town hall says no one notified it of the gathering and the legal deadline has already passed. The KOVO trade union, whose logo appeared in the video, said someone had used its mark without permission. And according to two independent analyses, the figure of Adam Sikora does not belong to a real person — his face was generated by a computer.

It is so far the latest episode in a campaign that has been trying for two weeks to manufacture a border crisis between Poland and Czechia. It is worth attention here as well, because it shows a craft that can be repeated on any Central European border, including ours.

A protest called by a computer-generated face

The “Adam Sikora” profile was created on Facebook in February 2026. The surname is common in the Těšín region, which helps the profile come across as a local neighbour. Its first post was not political, but an advertisement for the sale of a house in Ropice near Třinec. The house did not exist, just like its owner — in one photograph there is a fence in front of the building, in the other there is not. Facebook itself labelled the photos as artificially created. CyberDefence24 ↗

The profile photograph was examined by two independent institutions. The American company Resemble AI classified it as a synthetically created image with an “unnatural connection of the hair to the surroundings and small geometric inconsistencies around the collar and zipper”. Eva Klusová from the Institute of Psychology of the Czech Academy of Sciences put it more sharply: “The manipulation map includes not only the face, but the whole image. That means it was not an edited photograph of a real person — no one stole anyone’s face here. That face simply never existed. Together with the landscape in the background, it was made with a single goal: to look like a neighbour.” CyberDefence24 ↗

The profile published the invitation to the protest on August 19 and promoted it as a paid ad — it remained in Meta’s ad library for four days. Who paid for it cannot be determined from public data. A criminal complaint with the Moravian-Silesian police administration was filed by Janusz Konieczny, an analyst for the Czech Pirate Party, and MP Andrea Hoffmannová, deputy mayor of Ostrava from 2018 to 2026. The complaint refers to two sections of the Czech Criminal Code — activity for a foreign power to the detriment of the Czech Republic, carrying one to five years, and incitement to hatred, punishable by up to three years. CyberDefence24 ↗

How the crisis was manufactured: hacked radio and an iROZHLAS double

The protest is only the second phase. The first took place on the Polish side of the border and was technically more demanding. Around August 16, unknown attackers got into the editorial system of the public-service Radio PiK in Bydgoszcz and replaced an already published text with a fake one. “Someone broke into the editorial system of the radiopik.pl portal and replaced a published text with a false one — claiming that Poland was allegedly planning to seize a piece of Czech territory. We firmly distance ourselves from this content,” the newsroom wrote. An almost identical article appeared at the same time on tcz.pl, a local media outlet from Tczew. CyberDefence24 ↗ TVP World ↗

The third place where the same text appeared was a site posing as a Czech news portal. The attackers registered the domain lrozhlas.cz — it differs from the real iROZHLAS address in that a lowercase “l” appears at the beginning instead of a lowercase “i”. The difference is a single character at the start and can easily be missed in a quick reading of the address — in sans-serif fonts, such as those used by browsers, an uppercase “I” is also indistinguishable from a lowercase “l”. The fake site also linked heavily to real articles from the genuine iROZHLAS, borrowing its credibility. It wrote that people in the border region were selling houses out of fear of border changes. zwrot.cz ↗

The social-media part was handled by two fraudulent Facebook accounts: one impersonated the Czech ambassador to Poland, the other the Polish deputy foreign minister. Both had profile and cover photos set on May 22 and 25, almost three months before the operation — the accounts were built in advance and until then had appeared neutral. The fake ambassador published a video in which a figure indistinguishable from the real diplomat rejected alleged Polish claims. About ten thousand people saw it before the platform removed it. CyberDefence24 ↗

The two words that gave away the forgery

The central prop was a letter supposedly originating from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and requesting a revision of the state border and the transfer of plots with an area of 638.44 hectares. The document was entirely in Czech — except for the last two words. The sentence ends with the phrase “o své hluboké úctě.dzy oboma państwami”, where the ending suddenly switches into Polish. zwrot.cz ↗

According to CyberDefence24, this suggests the text was generated by a language model: when the model receives both the instruction and the source material in one language and the output is supposed to be in another, at the end of a longer text it may return to the language of the instruction. For readers, it is a useful rule — an official-looking document that changes language in the middle or at the end deserves verification with the institution that supposedly issued it.

More interesting is what followed. Two days after CyberDefence24 pointed out the language switch, someone replaced the image of the document with a cropped version so that the incriminating ending could not be seen. The operators of the campaign were therefore monitoring what was being published about them and correcting it as they went. CyberDefence24 ↗

What Is True About It: 368 Hectares, but Elsewhere

The campaign did not invent everything. A Polish-Czech border dispute really does exist, but it looks completely different. During the border adjustment in 1958, Poland handed over 1,205.9 hectares of land to Czechoslovakia and received 837.46 hectares back. The difference of 368.44 hectares is still recorded in Warsaw as a “border debt.” It concerns land near the Czech village of Bílá Voda opposite Poland’s Paczków, and land adjacent to the village of Bodzanów in the Głuchołazy gmina. Wirtualna Polska ↗

Two things matter here. First: the campaign inflated the figure from 368.44 to 638.44 hectares, or by 73 percent, and turned a decades-long diplomatic negotiation into a unilateral seizure of territory. Second, and more important: Głuchołazy and Paczków have nothing to do with Zaolzie. They lie on a completely different section of the Polish-Czech border — Bílá Voda in the Olomouc Region, Głuchołazy and Paczków on the Polish side in Opole Voivodeship — more than one hundred kilometers west of the Těšín area. The operation therefore took a technical and dull item from the agenda of two ministries and attached it to an entirely different, emotionally charged topic.

That the dispute is real is also confirmed by the Polish foreign ministry’s response to a parliamentary interpellation from April this year: the government’s position is that the settlement should be regulated by an international treaty and the transfer of territory. Negotiations had been stalled since 2015, and the topic was last raised by Minister Radosław Sikorski with his Czech counterpart in February. CyberDefence24 ↗

Why Zaolzie

The choice of topic was not random. Zaolzie is a strip of Czech Silesia that lies beyond the Olza River — that is exactly what the Polish name means, and it reveals the perspective from which it originated. It is one of the most sensitive places in Polish-Czech history. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, both new republics claimed it; in January 1919 there was brief fighting over the territory, and in July 1920 the Spa Conference divided it — Czechoslovakia received 58 percent of the Těšín area, with 68 percent of its population. Poland saw this as an injustice.

Retaliation came in 1938. The day after the Munich Agreement, on September 30, Warsaw sent Prague an ultimatum; Prague accepted it the following day, and at the beginning of October the Polish army occupied 801 square kilometers with more than 227,000 inhabitants. After the war, the territory returned to Czechoslovakia within the 1920 borders. It is therefore one of the few borders in the region where each side remembers both an injustice and its own wrongdoing — exactly the kind of wound that can be pressed from both sides at once.

The Polish minority is now significantly smaller than it once was. In the 2021 census, 38,218 people across the Czech Republic declared Polish nationality, of whom 26,802 stated exclusively Polish nationality and the rest combined it with another. Most live specifically in the districts of Karviná and Frýdek-Místek. In 2001 there were 51,968 of them, meaning the number has fallen by roughly a quarter over two decades.

That the operation targeted both sides is shown by the comments under the posts. The following quotations are examples of fake content from accounts that analysts identified as part of the campaign, not authentic voices of locals. One fake account warned of a “very dangerous game with territorial claims” by Poland, another complained about the “advancing Polonization of Czech Těšín” and the minority’s growing demands for bilingual signs. A third account, with a Cyrillic name and a Serbian flag in its profile, by contrast wrote “Cieszyn forever Poland” — and had previously been active on the Serbian internet. CyberDefence24 ↗

Who Is Behind It

No one has yet named a specific actor. The disinformation analysis center of Poland’s state institute NASK told CyberDefence24 that the “modus operandi of the adversaries corresponds to known methods used by the Russian side,” but added that “at this stage, no unequivocal attribution of the incident has been made.” According to NASK, Poland and Czechia cooperated at the operational level and in exchanging data. The institute continuously reported the fake accounts to Facebook. CyberDefence24 ↗

The substitution of a similar letter in the domain and the imitation of an established media outlet recall methods known from the Doppelganger network, which analysts have linked since 2022 to Russia’s Social Design Agency and which copied Der Spiegel, Le Monde and the Washington Post in this way. Similarity of method, however, is not proof of authorship, and neither Polish nor Czech authorities have so far named anyone. Wirtualna Polska ↗

The Limits of This View

The campaign was small. According to NASK, the most-watched material had thirteen thousand views, while the invitation to the protest collected 831 “likes,” 41 comments and 48 shares. Those are the numbers of a local Facebook group, not a mass reach — and writing about such an operation carries the risk that we ourselves amplify its impact. That is why we do not give the names of the fake accounts or the address of the fraudulent site in a clickable form. CyberDefence24 took the same approach.

At the same time, debunking this specific lie does not solve the essential issue. When a reader hears that “Poland is not demanding any 638 hectares,” they also learn that some border dispute really does exist and that Warsaw is raising it. Suspicion survives the correction — and that is the most sophisticated part of this operation. A campaign built on pure invention can be extinguished with precise reporting. A campaign that chooses as its raw material a real, if marginal, grievance leaves behind a frame into which anything can be inserted next time.

Moreover, most of what we know about the campaign comes from a single source — the Polish portal CyberDefence24, which uncovered it and continues to monitor it. The Czech investigation is under way, but its conclusions are not yet public.

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