Because of propaganda. There is a lot of missinformations. Even people in their late twenty’s or before 30, often they compare EU to USSR, they are to young to remember USSR from their own lives and they believes in propaganda about it.

This is evident even from the results of the presidential elections where at least two candidates were openly pro-Russian. But it didn’t matter, because in discussions among ordinary people the main criteria for the election were fear of gays, EU immigrants and immigrants from Ukraine. Folks want easy explanations of difficult problems so there is a group of people which gives them that. It’s easy to blame everything on gays, the evil and leftist European Union, immigrants from Ukraine for driving expensive cars or “living off social benefits” and then show up in Russia and say “look what a nice conservative country, there are no such problems here.” Of course, I’m generalizing a bit, but this is more or less the reasoning of many people, including young people, who take their message from conspiracy theories on tiktok and YouTube. This is a really serious problem in Poland.