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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Thursday, August 13, that Polish services arrested a Russian citizen on August 7 over a plot to kill a Ukrainian American in Warsaw, CBS News reported. Tusk said the intended target was a US citizen of Ukrainian origin who was seen as inconvenient to the Putin government. Neither the suspect nor the target was named.
Tusk said the suspect had been recruited by Russia's secret services. He credited Poland's Internal Security Agency and the police with stopping the attack shortly before it was due to be carried out, Al Jazeera reported. Tomasz Siemoniak, the minister who oversees Poland's security services, wrote on X that the operation was run in cooperation with US services. The Russian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
"This is the first situation of its kind in which someone, acting on Russian orders, decided to carry out an attack against an American citizen on the territory of another NATO country," Tusk told reporters. He called the case a very dangerous signal and said governments should assume Moscow will keep pursuing people it finds inconvenient.
The arrest follows a run of similar cases across Europe. French officials disrupted a plot last year against Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian exile who helps military defectors leave the country and lives under police protection. Lithuanian services broke up two plots in the same period, one against a Lithuanian supporter of Ukraine and one against a Russian activist. German authorities stopped an operation aimed at the head of a weapons company supplying Ukraine, and a second aimed at a Ukrainian military official. Polish authorities arrested a man in 2024 over an alleged plan to assassinate Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Poland has treated itself as a front-line target since it became the main supply route into Ukraine. In June a Russian artist critical of Putin was shot dead near his home in eastern Poland, and Tusk said at the time that the killing carried the marks of a political assassination. Polish officials have not formally attributed it to Moscow. The Associated Press has mapped roughly 200 acts of sabotage, arson and disruption across Europe since 2022 that officials link to Russia.
Older cases set the pattern. British authorities blamed Russia for the 2006 polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and the 2018 Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. German courts found that Russia organized the 2019 shooting of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park.
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