Poland escaped a “serious catastrophe with casualties” on Saturday evening. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said this on Tuesday afternoon after an investigation by Polish authorities into the train derailment this weekend.
Just after half past nine on Saturday evening, the police received a report from a resident of the village of Mika, about 100 kilometers southeast of Warsaw, who had heard a bang. The next morning, a train driver driving past the village noticed a damaged section of track. He managed to brake in time. There were no casualties.
Another incident took place on the same track: windows of a train with 475 passengers were damaged, probably due to a broken overhead line.
Tusk spoke in the Sejm (the Polish lower house) on Tuesday of an “unprecedented act of sabotage”. Two Ukrainians, who crossed the border into Belarus after the action, have been identified as suspects. One of the suspects had previously been convicted of sabotage in Ukraine.
According to Tusk, there is no doubt that they attempted to blow up the train on the railway line that is important for the delivery of aid to Ukraine. Explosives were found around the track, but not all of them had gone off.
The Polish government says Russian security services are behind the sabotage operation.
Fear and division
It is not the first act of sabotage in Poland since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Last year, a fire was set in a shopping center with four hundred stores in a Warsaw suburb. The shopping center burned down completely. Three Ukrainians have now been convicted for that fire for involvement in the arson, which, according to the Polish authorities, was carried out on behalf of the Russian intelligence services.
Russia’s hand was also seen behind the approximately twenty drones that flew into Polish territory two months ago. Some of these drones were taken out of the air by Dutch and Polish fighter planes. The action was labeled by the Poles as a Russian “act of aggression”.
Moreover, since the war in Ukraine, around fifty people have been arrested in Poland for allegedly working on behalf of the Russian security services. These people, mainly from Ukraine and Belarus, were often recruited via chat service Telegram, research by NRC to sixteen convicts.
For small amounts of money, a few tens of euros, they did seemingly innocent jobs: such as placing controversial graffiti texts on monuments. This quickly led to larger services for higher amounts, such as photographing Polish airports and seaports, train tracks and defense sites. Some of them went even further and placed cameras in these places. The youngest of the convicts was sixteen years old when he carried out assignments for the Russians.
The aim of the sabotage actions is to cause fear and division among the population, security experts previously said NRC. Moreover, after every major sabotage action, the Polish internet is flooded with Russian disinformation – which is mainly followed by radical right-wing politicians. Prime Minister Tusk warns that Russia not only wants to cause immediate chaos with the sabotage actions, but also “wants to stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiments.”
This seems to have some effect: in Poland, support for Ukraine is slowly declining among the population. This is reinforced by Polish politicians, including recently appointed President Karol Nawrocki, who are increasingly using harsher language about Ukrainians in Poland.
According to Tusk, “a line has been crossed again” with the train derailment. The prime minister calls the situation “the most serious in Poland” since the beginning of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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