Warsaw accuses Moscow of sabotage and closes Kraków consulate

Brussels – For the Polish government, Russian services were behind the fire that devastated Warsaw’s largest shopping mall a year ago, to whose direction a series of attacks and sabotage across Europe would actually be attributable. As a countermeasure, he announced the closing of the Federation’s consulate in Kraków, while the Kremlin dismisses the allegations.

There is no doubt for the government of Donald Tusk: Responsibility for the fire that exactly one year ago, on May 12, 2024, almost razed the Marywilska shopping centre, the capital’s largest, is undoubtedly of Moscow’s intelligence. The prime minister announced last night (May 11), on the eve of the first anniversary of the attack, which fortunately had not resulted in any casualties, that it was “an arson fire ordered by the Russian security services.”

The criminal activities “were coordinated by a person residing in Russia,” Tusk said, claiming that some of the perpetrators are already in the hands of Polish law enforcement while searches are still ongoing for the others. “We will catch them all!” he concluded.

“We have in-depth knowledge of the course of the fire,” claimed the interior and justice ministers, Tomasz Siemoniak and Adam Bodnar, in a joint note, in which they also linked those responsible for the bombing to analogous “sabotage activities” allegedly conducted by Moscow services in neighboring Lithuania (investigators in Vilnius cooperated in the investigation with Polish authorities).

This morning (May 12), Warsaw’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, announced the imminent closure of the Russian consulate in Kraków, which currently employs three diplomats and four employees. A similar decision had already been made last fall, when, following suspected Russian sabotage attempts, the consular facility in the western city of Poznan was closed. To that move, Moscow had responded by closing the Polish consulate in St. Petersburg. The Federation’s diplomatic offices in Poland thus remain the embassy, in the capital, and the consulate in Gdansk.

I have a message to the Russian authorities: we know what you are doing, we don’t accept it, and we will draw conclusions.
Reminder – after the previous act of diversion I closed the Russian consulate in Poznan. pic.twitter.com/Go5hALZgUb

– Radosław Sikorski (@sikorskiradek)
May 12, 2025

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According to Poland and the Baltic states, Russia has been carrying out a series of acts of sabotage and hybrid warfare in the region for years, as part of a destabilisation campaign of the EU orchestrated by the Kremlin, to which is ascribed, among other things, the instrumentalisation of migrants along the border with Belarus. Last March, authorities in Warsaw accused a Belarusian national of setting another arson fire in the capital, in a similar manner to the one at the shopping centre, which had been carried out about a month earlier.

Moscow returned the accusations to sender via Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, who denounced the Polish government’s “absolutely Russophobic and hostile stance” and denied in general any Moscow involvement in acts of sabotage on the Old Continent.