Ukrainians charged over arson attack at Warsaw shopping centre on behalf of Russia

Poland has announced terrorism and espionage charges against two Ukrainian citizens over their alleged involvement in an arson attack carried out on behalf of Russia that resulted in the destruction of Warsaw’s largest shopping centre last year.

Russia, however, has dismissed the accusations against it as “baseless” and motivated by Polish “Russophobia”.

On Sunday evening, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that Poland now “knows for sure” that Russia was behind the fire that destroyed the Marywilska 44 shopping centre one year ago. On Monday morning, foreign minister Radosław Sikorski ordered the closure of Russia’s consulate in Kraków in retaliation.

A few hours later, the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office released a statement confirming its findings that the fire “was the result of arson committed by members of an organised criminal group acting on behalf of…Russia”. It announced the decision to bring charges against two Ukrainian men in relation to the case.

One of the men, named only as Oleksander V. under Polish privacy law and born in 1975, was found to have issued an order to the second, Daniil B. (born in 2006), to travel to the shopping centre in the early hours of 12 May 2024 and film the fire and actions of the emergency services.

Oleksander V., who was located in Russia, knew the specific time that the fire would break out and the video Daniil B. sent him quickly appeared on “Russian propaganda websites”, say Polish prosecutors.

Daniil B. has been charged with two crimes. The first is participating in an organised group aimed at committing acts of sabotage and terrorist offences consisting of causing fires in large-scale facilities located in European Union countries in order to intimidate people.

The second offence is committing acts of sabotage and a terrorist crime, jointly and in agreement with other persons, acting on behalf of the intelligence services of Russia against Poland. If found guilty, he would face imprisonment of between 10 years and life.

Daniil B. was presented with the charges in Lithuania, where he is currently in pretrial detention in connection with another arson, against an IKEA store in Vilnius, allegedly carried out by the same criminal group.

Meanwhile, although Polish prosecutors have decided to bring the same two charges against Oleksander V., as well as two additional unspecified ones, they have not been able to present them to him as he is believed to still be in Russia. A request for a European Arrest Warrant has been issued against him.

However, in response to today’s announcements, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the “various accusations… against Russia in Poland…[are] part of its absolutely Russophobic position towards our country”, reports the TASS news agency. “These accusations are always absolutely baseless”.

The Polish and Lithuanian authorities have been cooperating in their investigations into various cases of sabotage. In March this year, that led to terrorism charges being issued in Poland against a Belarusian man accused of carrying out an earlier arson attack in Warsaw on behalf of Russia.

Over the last year, there have been a series of acts of sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks that Poland says were carried out by agents – often Ukrainian and Belarusian immigrants – acting on behalf of Russia.

Commenting on today’s announcements, the spokesman for the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office, Przemysław Nowak, said that “there are several groups of this nature [like the one responsible for the Marywilska fire] operating in Poland”.

Main image credit: Prokuratura Krajowa (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)