Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has described last weekend’s sabotage attack on Poland’s rail system as “an act of state terrorism” ordered by Russia, as he announced that Poland was closing the last remaining Russian consulate in the country.
“The clear intention was to cause human casualties,” he said of the weekend bomb attack.
The Polish security services said they were in the process of arresting several people linked to the incident.
“They are on the trail of the principals; they are on the trail of the perpetrators … the first arrests are now taking place,” the spokesperson Jacek Dobrzyński said on Wednesday morning. He said later that four people had been arrested.
On Tuesday, the prime minister, Donald Tusk, said authorities had identified two Ukrainian citizens involved in the attack, who had arrived in Poland from Belarus and left soon after placing explosive devices on the rail tracks over the weekend.
Tusk said Poland believed the men were cooperating with Russia’s security services and one had been arrested previously for sabotage in Ukraine. The pair are reportedly not among those who have been arrested.
The blast damaged rail tracks near the town of Mika, on a rail line linking Warsaw and eastern Poland, a key logistics route towards the border with Ukraine. There were no casualties, as the gap in the tracks was spotted by a regional train driver who alerted authorities. In a separate incident, power cables were destroyed along a nearby section of track.
Sikorski said he was ordering the closure of the Gdańsk consulate “though it will not be our full response” to the attack. He did not specify what other measures Poland might take. Poland has closed two other Russian consulates, in Kraków and Poznan, in recent years. The embassy in Warsaw remains open.
Russia’s foreign ministry said it would “reduce Poland’s diplomatic and consular presence in Russia” in response.
“Relations with Poland have completely deteriorated,” said the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. “This is probably a manifestation of this deterioration – the Polish authorities’ desire to reduce any possibility of consular or diplomatic relations to zero.”
Russia has denied being behind sabotage attacks in Europe, but Polish and other European intelligence services believe Moscow has launched a campaign of arson, explosions and infrastructure attacks in order to test Europe’s defences and weaken support for Ukraine. The attacks usually use one-time operatives recruited over the Telegram app, often Ukrainian citizens.
Tusk spoke with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on Wednesday morning, with the Ukrainian president promising “to share all information” relating to the attack. The two countries would set up a bilateral working group to try to prevent further incidents, Zelenskyy said.
“Our information is the same: all the facts indicate that there is a Russian trace behind all of this,” he said. He compared the attacks in Poland to daily sabotage acts in Ukraine.
Speaking at a press conference in Warsaw, the chief of the Polish general staff, Wiesław Kukuła, said the long winter nights in the upcoming holiday season could be perceived by Russia as the perfect time to increase sabotage activity. “We must not allow this to happen,” he said.
Kukuła added that the army wanted to prepare for a “wide range” of potential incidents “to eliminate any space for this type of activity”.
The defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, announced at the same press conference that the army was working on a plan, Operation Horizon, to deploy 10,000 soldiers to protect critical infrastructure across the country to “counteract acts of diversion and raise the level of security for Polish citizens”.
