Poland Calls Starlink Station Fire Sabotage, But Investigators Say It's Too Early to Blame Russia

A fire broke out Wednesday night at a Starlink satellite ground station in Wola Krobowska, a town in Poland's Masovian Voivodeship. Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, who also serves as digital affairs minister, wasted no time calling it sabotage.

"This act of sabotage was deliberately designed to disable the station... disrupting internet access for various institutions, including the Ukrainian army," Gawkowski told Polish public broadcaster TVP Info. He said "many indications suggest" the fire fits a "new Russian doctrine of attack."

Gawkowski himself admitted investigators haven't established that Russia did it. Jacek Dobrzyński, spokesperson for Poland's Minister-Coordinator of Special Services, pushed back directly, telling TVN24 and Zero.pl that "not all arson, not all disasters, are acts of sabotage." He said police are still weighing multiple scenarios, from deliberate arson to a plain electrical short circuit, and that "it's too early to talk about sabotage."

A cabinet minister called it Russian sabotage on live television before the people actually gathering evidence would say the same thing. Poland has a well-documented pattern of Russian-linked hybrid incidents, and this specific fire hasn't been confirmed as one of them.

The station, owned by state telecom company Exatel, routes internet traffic through Poland, including to Ukraine, and connects to SpaceX's Starlink terminal network, according to Euronews. The fire damaged the power station, distribution board, and generator. Nobody was hurt, firefighters put it out, and Gawkowski said the facility is back to full operation.

Poland spends roughly $50 million a year maintaining about 42,000 Starlink terminals inside Ukraine. Aggregator Newscord found that nine of fifteen outlets it reviewed left this detail out entirely. Knock out the wrong relay station and you're not just inconveniencing a Polish town, you're touching a system Ukrainian forces actually rely on.

The fire didn't happen in a vacuum. On the same day, Poland scrambled fighter jets after a Russian military helicopter briefly crossed into its airspace, according to the BBC. Earlier this month Germany blamed Russia for an attempted drone strike on Leipzig/Halle Airport, and France ordered up a plan to protect critical infrastructure and defense sites. The Kremlin has not commented on the Polish fire, and Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said Moscow has no plans to attack NATO states.

Denmark's Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) put out a formal threat assessment this week warning that Russia is likely to escalate hybrid warfare against NATO allies in the coming months. Thomas Ahrenkiel, the agency's chief, said Russia could send a small number of unmarked troops into a limited area of a neighboring NATO country, potentially under the pretext of protecting ethnic Russian minorities, with the goal of dividing the alliance, according to the Financial Times.

The Danish assessment calls an outright Russian attack on a NATO country "highly unlikely" but says the risk is "low but growing." It also concludes Russia is under more strain than at any point since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and doesn't expect a major battlefield breakthrough in the next six months. Danish Defence Minister Jeppe Bruus says Moscow is turning its pressure toward the West's support pipeline instead. The Guardian reported the assessment also flags a "high risk" of casualties from future sabotage operations and raises the possibility of false-flag attacks using Ukrainian drones to muddy attribution.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered his own framing earlier this month, saying it's Europe talking about preparing for war, and warning that "if Europe attacks Russia, it will be a completely different war... and it will be very short."

Overnight into Thursday, Russian strikes hit Kharkiv and Kyiv. Ukraine's state emergency services said six agricultural workers were killed and twelve injured when a strike hit a farm in the village of Stara Hnylytsia, four of the dead women sorting vegetables. In Kyiv, two people died and eight were injured, with more than 50 civilian facilities damaged including a maternity hospital, where a woman gave birth in a shelter during the attack, according to the hospital's director.

Polish police have not said when their investigation into the Wola Krobowska fire will conclude. Until it does, nobody outside that investigation actually knows whether Moscow's hand was on this one, whatever a government minister said on television the night it happened.