Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said on Wednesday that he will order the closure of the last Russian consulate still operating in the country after authorities said Russian intelligence was suspected of being behind the blast on a railway line in Poland, deemed to be an act of sabotage.
Sikorski stated he had repeatedly warned Russia that its diplomatic and consular presence would be reduced further if it did not cease hostile actions against Poland, Polish news agency PAP reported.
“In connection with this, though it will not be our full response, I have decided to withdraw consent for the operation of the last Russian consulate in Gdansk,” he said.
He added that Moscow would be formally notified within hours.
“This time it was an act of not only subversion, as happened before, but an act of state terror as its clear intention was to cause human casualties,” Sikorski said.
The closure will leave Russia with only its embassy in Warsaw.
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has described the weekend explosion on a line linking Warsaw to the border with Ukraine as an “unprecedented act of sabotage.”
The blast damaged tracks near Mika, about 100 kilometres southeast of the Polish capital. No one was hurt.
In a separate incident at the weekend, power lines were destroyed in the area of Puławy, about 50 kilometres from Lublin in eastern Poland.
Asked about Sikorski’s comments, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Russia’s “relations with Poland have deteriorated completely.”
On Tuesday, Tusk told the Polish parliament that the two suspects had been collaborating with the Russian secret services for a long time.
He said their identities were known but could not be revealed to the public because of the ongoing investigation, and that the pair had already left Poland, crossing into Belarus.
Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Moscow’s goal, Western officials say, is to undermine support for Ukraine, spark fear and divide European societies.
Poland had already ordered the closure of two other Russian consulates. The consulate in Kraków was closed earlier this year after Poland determined that a fire that destroyed a shopping centre in Warsaw in 2024 was the result of arson ordered by the Russian intelligence service.
And in 2024, Sikorski ordered the closure of the consulate in Poznań, in response to acts of sabotage, including arson, that he said were sponsored by Moscow.
Additional sources • AP
