A fire damaged a Starlink satellite ground station in the village of Wola Krobowska, in Poland’s Masovian Voivodeship, on the evening of September 23, Polish broadcaster RMF FM reports. Investigators believe arson is the most likely cause, according to Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski.
The alarm was raised late in the evening by the owner of the property where the station’s equipment sits. He called the emergency number to say the antennas were on fire and the generator had already been damaged. Firefighters who responded to his call put out the blaze.
The incident was reported to Poland’s Internal Security Agency and the police Central Bureau of Investigation. Riot police and officers from the regional police headquarters were also called to the scene. By the morning of September 24, police technicians were still collecting evidence at the site, and police were patrolling the village.
RMF FM reporter Krzysztof Zasada, who visited the station, said it houses about a dozen white spherical antennas, each roughly 2 meters across. The site is surrounded by a sheet-metal fence. Together with a similar station near Kaunas in Lithuania, the Wola Krobowska facility provides internet access to a large part of Central and Eastern Europe.
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Gawkowski, who is also Poland’s digital affairs minister, said there are many signs the fire was a deliberate attempt to knock the station offline. The station is operated by Exatel, a state-owned telecom company that plays a key role in network security and internet access, including for Ukraine. Any outage at stations like this, the minister explained, means internet disruptions — and, in turn, problems with services such as ATMs.
“The fire engulfed the power installation and the generator. Clearly, this act of sabotage was meant to take the station down — effectively cutting the internet connection… and disrupting internet access for various institutions, including the Ukrainian military. Although everything is working today, we have to acknowledge — as Prime Minister Tusk recently noted — that this is part of a hybrid war,” Gawkowski said.
He added that Russia’s involvement in the fire has not been established. Still, in his words, “many signs indicate that this is consistent with Russia’s new doctrine of attack.”
Meanwhile, a Russian attack this week damaged several data centers in Kyiv and cut off service for some subscribers.
