For Prime Minister Tusk, incidents on Polish railways are “sabotage”. Russian services in the crosshairs

Brussels – The accidents on Polish railway lines are undoubtedly “acts of sabotage“. The prime minister, Donald Tusk, and the rest of the government are convinced of this. Speaking today (18 November) to the Sejm, the lower house of the parliament in Warsaw, the premier said that the investigating authorities have identified two suspects for what they believe are foreign-orchestrated attacks. 

They are two Ukrainian citizens who, according to Polish services, have been collaborating with Russia for some time. According to Tusk, who spoke of an “unprecedented act of sabotage“, the two men—whose identities he did not disclose—allegedly entered Poland via Belarus, where they escaped again following the attacks. One of the two already had a court-issued conviction for sabotage in Lviv, Ukraine. 

A meeting of the government’s National Security Committee was held this morning, also attended by military commanders and intelligence chiefs. Jacek Dobrzyński, spokesman for the Ministry of Security, said at the end of the meeting that, based on the evidence gathered so far, everything suggests that the incident was “provoked by Russian intelligence services.” According to Tusk, “the explosion was most likely intended to blow up the train” that was travelling in the area.

Last weekend, two separate accidents occurred on the Polish railway network. The most serious, which has received the most media attention in recent days, occurred on Sunday (16 November) along the section between Warsaw and Lublin. An explosion damaged the tracks at the height of the village of Mika, a hundred kilometres south-east of the capital. 

The railway line in question continues to Lviv and is one of the main arteries along which aid destined for Ukraine, both humanitarian and military, travels. For this reason, too, everyone in Warsaw is (almost) convinced that Moscow had a hand in the attacks. The Kremlin, this reasoning goes, would have every interest in discouraging Polish solidarity with Kyiv’s resistance. 

In the other accident, which occurred on Saturday (15 November), electrical installations were damaged along another section of the same railway line, some fifty kilometres further south, near Puławy. Passenger trains were forced to stop at both locations, but there were no injuries. The damage was repaired. 

Both incidents posed “an immediate danger of a land traffic disaster, threatening the lives and safety of many people and property on a large scale,” the prosecutors conducting the investigation emphasised. The military has been instructed to verify the safety of railways and other critical infrastructure in the eastern part of the country.