PM Tusk summons special services council over "alleged Russian and Belarusian influence"

"I have called a meeting of the Council for Special Services for tomorrow. The topic (is) the alleged Russian and Belarusian influence in the Polish power apparatus in previous years," Tusk said on X on Tuesday.

On Monday, the government said it was verifying if a Polish judge, who had access to confidential information and asked for political asylum in Belarus, had been spying.

In a video aired by Russian TV, the judge - Tomasz Szmydt - said he acted in protest to Poland's policy towards Russia and Belarus.

A hub for Western military supplies to Ukraine as it fights Russia's invasion, Poland says it has become a major target of Russian spies. It accuses Moscow and its ally Belarus of trying to destabilise it.

"We must be aware that services, in this case Belarusian ones, worked with a person who had direct access to the Minister of Justice... who had access to various classified documents to which no intelligence service should have had access," Tusk said before a government meeting earlier on Tuesday.

"The fact that judge (Tomasz) Szmydt's relationship with Belarusians has a long history, that it is not a matter of recent months, must be a cause for deep concern."

Prosecutors are checking if Szmydt has been spying against Poland given his Monday's statement and information he had access to as a judge, a Polish State Prosecutor's Office spokesperson told Reuters.

Szmydt was slated to rule on cases concerning issuing security clearances to information on NATO and European Union secrets next month, according to a calendar of court sittings of the Warsaw administrative court.

"The matter requires immediate clarification," Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters on Monday, adding that going to Belarus makes previous activities a matter that "gives a lot to think about."

Separately, the Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) said it is checking the scope of confidential information that Szmydt had access to, said a spokesperson for the coordinator of Poland's secret services.

Szmydt was also one of the central figures in the so-called hate scandal of 2019, revealed by the Onet news portal.

Its reporters alleged at the time that a group of people controlled by the then deputy justice minister Łukasz Piebiak was used to wage an online hate campaign against Polish judges contesting the justice system reforms introduced by the previous, right-wing government.

After the publication of the Onet report, Piebiak stepped down from office.