After the initial containment, Poland has verbalized the hypothesis that everyone suspected about who was behind the sabotage of its railway infrastructure perpetrated this weekend. Unsurprisingly, Polish authorities are targeting Russia, pending completion of the investigation. As the spokesperson of the Polish Ministry of Special Services pointed out to the press on Tuesday, referring to the “principals” of the secret operation, “everything indicates that it was the Russian secret services”. The prime minister, the liberal conservative Donald Tusk, then announced that the authorities had identified the alleged perpetrators of the attack: two Ukrainian citizens who have long worked for Moscow. The act “was intentional” and its goal was “to cause a train wreck,” according to Tusk.
In statements before the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, Tusk explained, without revealing his identity – which has been verified – that one of the perpetrators is “a Ukrainian citizen convicted by a court in Lviv in May this year for acts of sabotage in Ukraine”. This man, according to the Polish leader, resides in Belarus. “The other is a resident of Donbass. He also entered Poland from Belarus this autumn, shortly before the attacks,” Tusk continued.
Both left Poland immediately after the attack and entered Belarus through the Terespol border crossing. “Polish services have all the information about these people and recorded images,” said the prime minister, who led an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council in the morning. According to his account, the acts of sabotage “happened at intervals.”
The Warsaw-Lublin line, on which 115 trains run per day and which is used to transport supplies for Ukraine, has suffered several damages, as Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski explained on Monday. An explosive device blew up a stretch of road near Mika, about 100 kilometers south-east of the capital. Damage was also found on 60 meters of power lines and a metal band was detected on the rails, a few hundred meters away.
The National Prosecutor’s Office is treating the case as “acts of sabotage of a terrorist nature, directed against the railway infrastructure and committed for the benefit of foreign secret services”, it said in a statement.
In an interview on Radio Zet on Tuesday, Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz also suggested that Moscow was behind the “unprecedented sabotage,” as Tusk described it on Monday. “Analyzing events in Poland, in Europe, at airports, in acts of sabotage in other countries, in arson of shopping centers, all the clues point east, towards Russia,” the minister declared.
The defense minister described the hybrid actions that Russia perpetrates to weaken the West as “a state between war and peace,” known as a gray zone. “Attacks, acts of sabotage, disinformation, attempts to destroy critical infrastructures in Europe, new migratory routes to disturb the peace (…)”, are elements of a “new type of war”, as the minister defined it.
In the face of these aggressions and provocations, Poland, the EU and NATO must “be cautious, but without fear; humble, but strong”, the defense chief said. “Everything is designed to destroy community, destroy alliances and sow uncertainty.”
Polish Chief of Staff General Wieslaw Kukula said in a radio interview on Sunday that “the adversary is preparing for war.” “They are creating an environment here whose goal is to create favorable conditions for possible aggression on Polish territory,” he added.
