Poland says fire at Exatel-Starlink ground station was likely sabotage

what happened

A fire broke out Wednesday evening at a Starlink ground station in Wola Krobowska, central Poland, operated by state-owned telecom Exatel, damaging the power station, distribution board and generator and briefly cutting internet connectivity the station provides to Poland and Ukraine, including Ukrainian military communications, per Euronews and the Kyiv Post. Deputy Prime Minister and Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski called it a deliberate act of sabotage and said the pattern fit Russian "hybrid warfare," while security spokesman Jacek Dobrzynski was more cautious, saying investigators are still weighing arson and electrical-malfunction scenarios and that "not all arson, not all disasters, are acts of sabotage." Poland's Internal Security Agency and police are investigating; the station has since resumed operations, per Kyiv Post and Notes from Poland. Investigators later found a bottle of flammable liquid near the burned distribution cabinet, a discovery that may indicate a homemade incendiary device, per RMF24 reporting cited by Militarnyi and Euromaidan Press. On September 25, Poland's National Prosecutor's Office formally opened a criminal investigation classifying the fire as sabotage and a terrorism-related crime committed on behalf of foreign intelligence; spokesman Przemyslaw Nowak said there are "reasonable grounds to suspect the perpetrators acted on the orders of Russian special services" aiming to disrupt Starlink connectivity in Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries, per TVN24. On October 12, Poland said German police had detained two Turkish nationals at its request over the arson, about a month after the fire; Special Services Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said "we have no doubt that Russian services are behind this act of sabotage," adding that Russian services are increasingly turning to individuals linked to the criminal underworld, while Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said the two men would face sabotage charges in Poland for acting on the instructions of a foreign intelligence agency, per Reuters. On October 13, Polish media reported German police had detained two more suspects, a woman believed to have acted as a driver and logistics helper for the two men and a second man whose role is still under investigation, bringing the total to four detained; Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Russian services are behind the sabotage, per RMF FM reporting cited by the Moscow Times. On October 27, Turkish police detained 85 people across 30 provinces in raids targeting the Daltonlar, an Istanbul-based crime group Turkish authorities say recruited members through social media and WhatsApp groups and is directed from Russia by its alleged leader Beratcan Gokdemir, whom Turkish officials say is wanted on an Interpol Red Notice; Turkish investigators linked the network to the suspects held in Germany over the Poland fire, though the Turkish statement on the raids did not tie the 85 detainees directly to the arson itself, per Turkish Minute and TeslaNorth.

why it matters

The incident puts a spotlight on the ground infrastructure Starlink's Ukraine service depends on: the Wola Krobowska site and a sister station in Lithuania relay traffic for the whole Central and Eastern Europe region, so an attack on either is a single point of failure risk for an operator whose resilience pitch has centered on the satellites themselves rather than the terrestrial gateways that connect them to the internet. The formal sabotage and terrorism classification, now paired with four named suspects and a direct ministerial attribution to Russian intelligence, raises the stakes for Exatel and Polish authorities to harden that infrastructure rather than treat it as a one-off accident. The Daltonlar raid shows the sabotage investigation has widened into a transnational recruitment network Turkish police say spans at least 30 provinces, reinforcing officials' read that these are coordinated operations rather than isolated incidents.

signal-to-noise

quick facts

Companies

SpaceX, Exatel

Category

geopolitical

Impact

notable

SNR

4 / 5

Event date

2026-09-24

Published

2026-09-24 12:23 UTC