Russian media reported on Wednesday, Poland’s Independence Day, that the Federal Security Service (FSB) had broken up a Polish espionage network in the Baltic exclave. TASS news agency said two Poles had been arrested on suspicion of gathering information on Russian military personnel and the region’s socio-economic situation, while seven other Poles and three Russians had been warned of criminal consequences.
Local Russian outlets suggested the case was not new. One suspect, a 40-year-old from Braniewo, was detained in July, while charges against the other relate to the period from January 2017 to December 2022.
Jacek Dobrzyński, spokesperson for Poland’s minister-coordinator of special services, said on X that he does not comment on material released by Russian services and on Independence Day “treats it in particular as another provocation and disinformation”.
Lieutenant Colonel Maciej Korowaj, an analyst at the Eastern Flank Institute, told Polish Press Agency (PAP) the announcement echoed Polish counter-intelligence wins.
“We really do have quite a few, and the Russians lack them. So they have to generate them”, he said.
Korowaj noted that intelligence agencies rarely send their own nationals abroad on such missions because they are easy to track, preferring to recruit locally. He said Moscow may also be under pressure from personnel changes in its intelligence and counter-intelligence services.
“Lacking real agents of Polish origin, they probably had to ‘stitch together’ a spy affair”, he said, suggesting Polish citizens who regularly cross the border could be provoked into committing an offence that is then turned into an espionage story.
He pointed to Poland’s recent record, including the November 3 detention by the Internal Security Agency (ABW) of two Ukrainians suspected of spying for Russia. Special services coordinator Tomasz Siemoniak said on Tuesday the men had photographed critical infrastructure and military sites.
An ABW report published in May showed Polish counter-intelligence had shifted from observation to offensive operations, Korowaj said.
“Dismantling the agent network and its communication channels must have been devastating for Russian intelligence, because it has to rebuild the entire espionage mechanism on our territory”, he said.
The report, covering 2024-2025, recorded heightened activity by Russian, Belarusian and Chinese services. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 91 people have been named suspects in Polish espionage cases and 62 detained.
Korowaj said the Kremlin-linked narrative also seeks to portray Polish services as unprofessional, unable to recruit Russians and forced to send their own citizens abroad. “It is a game on many levels”, he said.
He added that Belarus’s KGB had also “generated” Polish spies, citing its announcement in September last year of the detention of Poles, including a Carmelite friar from Kraków charged with espionage. Warsaw and human rights groups called that a provocation by President Alexander Lukashenko’s government.
(jh)
Source: PAP