Poland’s prime minister has accused President Karol Nawrocki’s camp of benefiting from a crypto firm allegedly built on Russian money, turning a dispute over regulation into a question of foreign influence, political financing and national security.
Donald Tusk has opened a dangerous new chapter in Poland’s civil war at the top of the state. In a speech to parliament reported by the Associated Press, the prime minister alleged that Zondacrypto, a cryptocurrency exchange active in Poland, was built on money tied to Russian organised crime and, more gravely still, to Russian intelligence services.
That would be inflammatory enough in any EU state. In Poland, with the war in neighbouring Ukraine still shaping every serious debate on security, it is political dynamite.
Tusk’s allegation went further. He said the company had sponsored politicians from the former nationalist ruling camp and helped fund the 2025 CPAC gathering in Poland, where Kristi Noem, then the US homeland security secretary, publicly backed Karol Nawrocki. The implication was plain enough: a Polish presidential campaign may have drawn indirect benefit from a company whose financial roots, Tusk says, lead back to Russia’s criminal and intelligence underworld.
These are not routine parliamentary insults. They are accusations which, if substantiated, would amount to a scandal of the first order.
The timing was no accident. Tusk delivered his broadside ahead of yet another effort by the Sejm to overturn Nawrocki’s veto of a crypto market regulation bill intended to bring Poland into line with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regime, or MiCA. The government lost again. According to TVP World, 243 deputies voted against the veto and 191 backed the president, leaving the ruling coalition short of the three-fifths majority required.
So the law remains blocked, and so does the government’s effort to impose tighter oversight on a sector it says is vulnerable to money laundering, opaque financing and external manipulation.
Tusk’s argument is brutally simple. This is not a technical disagreement about regulation. It is not a seminar dispute between crypto enthusiasts and finance ministries. It is a fight over whether foreign-tainted money has seeped into the arteries of Polish politics and whether the president has used his office to protect an industry ally.
That is the political meaning of the speech, even if the legal proof is still absent.
Nawrocki’s office has denied the allegations. So have right-wing politicians who oppose the bill. Their line is that the government’s legislation is clumsy, overbearing and harmful to a growing digital-assets sector. Zondacrypto, according to the AP report, did not answer questions on Tusk’s claims, though it has previously said it is co-operating with Polish authorities.
That matters, because Tusk has so far produced allegations, not verdicts. There is a difference between a devastating political charge and an established judicial fact. It would be irresponsible to collapse the two.
But it would be equally naïve to dismiss the affair as theatre. Poland’s political system has already been dragged into repeated trench warfare between the Tusk government and a hostile president. Last month Nawrocki vetoed legislation intended to unlock almost €44bn in EU-backed defence loans under the SAFE programme, prompting a furious clash with the government over military spending, sovereignty and Poland’s place inside the European security framework. The veto deepened an already poisonous relationship between the two centres of power.
Thousands protest in Warsaw after Nawrocki vetoes Poland’s SAFE bill
The crypto row is worse. Defence finance can be argued over in broad ideological terms. Alleged Russian-linked political money cannot. Once that charge is made, the argument ceases to be about policy and becomes one of legitimacy.
There is another embarrassment here for Warsaw. Poland has been described in recent reporting as the only EU state still to have failed fully to implement the bloc’s crypto-asset rules. That is hardly a distinction to relish for a country which presents itself as a serious frontline state in Europe’s security order. A government that cannot regulate politically sensitive financial flows while publicly alleging Russian-linked influence looks, at best, paralysed.
The scandal may yet collapse under scrutiny. Tusk may fail to produce the evidence needed to sustain so grave an accusation. But he has chosen his ground carefully. If investigators uncover a credible trail from Russian-linked funds to Polish political sponsorship, the consequences will not end with a bad week for the president. They could touch the integrity of the presidency itself.
For now, what is certain is this: Poland’s war at the summit of power has turned uglier, darker and more dangerous. Tusk has effectively told the country that the battle over crypto regulation is also a battle over Russian influence. Nawrocki, in turn, is left facing not just a policy dispute but a suspicion that will not easily disappear.
