By Olha Hembik | 2025-05-15

WARSAW -- They were not just stamping passports. Poland's government says the Russian consulate in Krakow was a hub for covert operations, not for diplomacy. This week, Warsaw ordered its imminent shutdown, accusing its staff of "subversive activities" carried out on Polish territory.

It is the second Russian consulate closed in less than a year, following the one in Poznan. Now, only a single Russian consulate remains, in Gdansk, as Poland tightens the perimeter around Moscow's diplomatic reach.

'We will get you all!'

Polish authorities have accused Russian intelligence agencies of orchestrating a major fire at the Marywilska shopping center in Warsaw last year. It swept across six hectares, destroying roughly 1,400 shops and kiosks, many of them operated by Vietnamese traders.

"We now know for sure that the great fire of the Marywilska shopping centre in Warsaw was caused by arson ordered by the Russian special services," Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk posted in English on X May 11.

"Some of the perpetrators have already been detained, all the others are identified and searched for," he continued.

"A designated person in Russia" organized the arsonists' actions, the Polish interior and justice ministries said in a joint statement.

"We will get you all!" wrote Tusk.

'We know what you are doing'

The Polish National Prosecutor's Office has released details of the deliberately set fire in Warsaw, which it blames on two Ukrainians belonging to a criminal group that operated in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia on orders from the Kremlin's intelligence agencies.

One suspect (Daniil B.), born in 2006, is in custody in Lithuania now.

He pleaded guilty May 9 to committing arson in Vilnius in 2024, Delfi.lt reported. He awaits his day in a Polish court, when the Lithuanians are finished with him.

The other Ukrainian (Oleksandr V.), born in 1975, is said to be in Russia, where he is out of reach of European Union prosecutors. Poland is accusing him in absentia.

Oleksandr V. remotely ordered Daniil B. to set both the Warsaw and Vilnius fires and to film them with his phone, Polish authorities say.

Some of the Lithuanian and Polish arson videos later appeared on Russian propaganda websites. The suspects in the Warsaw fire, if convicted, face 10 years to life behind bars.

On May 12, just one day after Tusk's statement, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski announced the impending closure of the Russian consulate in Krakow.

In a post on X, Sikorski addressed Russian intelligence agencies directly: "We know what you are doing," he wrote.

"After the previous act of sabotage, I closed the Russian consulate in Poznań," he said, referencing last October, when he ordered Russia to vacate that facility.

Sikorski made that decision after Wrocław police in January 2024 arrested a Ukrainian migrant who was plotting to set fire to a local paint factory on instructions from the Kremlin.

A 'powerful' diplomatic gesture

Residents of Krakow, Poland's second-largest city, enthusiastically welcomed the decision to close the Russian consulate in their city.

Locals "have been calling for this decision since the very beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine," Mayor Aleksander Miszalski wrote on Facebook. "I accept it with satisfaction."

Irina Antonets, an art historian and cultural manager who moved to Krakow at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, told Kontur that news of the closure had been circulating early in the day among a 3,000-member online community of Ukrainian women in the city. "We're very happy about this news," she said.

Antonets recalled numerous joint protests by Poles and Ukrainians outside the consulate, including one held after the Russian missile strike on Kyiv's Okhmatdyt children's hospital last July. She called the closure "a powerful diplomatic and political gesture."

Grateful for Poland's continued support of Ukraine, Antonets acknowledged that "a sick dictator and his minions may consider [the consulate shutdown] an act of aggression," referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

'A spy agency'

Since the start of the invasion, Russia's embassy and consulates in Poland have become targets of protest -- symbols, activists say, of a regime no longer welcome.

"This is already the second Russian diplomatic mission to disappear from the map of Poland. But in essence, it's a spy agency," Natalia Panchenko, director of Euromaidan-Warsaw, told Kontur. Her group regularly demonstrates outside the Russian embassy in Warsaw, calling to shut "the door on Kremlin propaganda forever."

Panchenko called the consulate closure "a step in the right direction but still not enough," arguing that "there's no room here for politeness towards the aggressor state." Euromaidan-Warsaw is demanding the expulsion of the Russian ambassador.

To that end, the Committee for the Defense of Democracy is gathering signatures on a petition to expel Ambassador Sergey Andreyev and cut diplomatic ties with Moscow until it ends its war on Ukraine and prosecutes those responsible for war crimes.

"Poland must send a clear signal that it will not... allow Russian [intelligence] services to continue operating under the guise of diplomacy," the petition reads.

Europe's resolve

Kyiv-based international development analyst Ulyana Bakh sees both the accusation of Russian involvement in the Warsaw shopping center fire and the closure of the Russian consulate in Krakow as signs of growing European resolve.

"Russia is beginning to be systematically and publicly slapped on the hand. The hybrid war it has been waging in Europe for years is no longer being blamed on 'unknown persons,'" Bakh told Kontur. "The world is starting to recognize that this is state aggression."

Russia will likely face consequences for cyberattacks as well, she said.

Bakh called the Krakow consulate closure "good news for Ukraine and a message to European countries," describing it as "a strong and principled diplomatic response to Russian sabotage in a European country."

Poland, she said, has shown how to act "not just with words but with actions -- closing consulates and other 'Russian houses' that have long become breeding grounds for spies."

Russia is weighing a "fitting response," according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, as reported by Deutsche Welle on May 12.