A fire at a Polish Starlink ground station is the third suspected hybrid-warfare incident on Poland's eastern approach in 48 hours

A fire damaged a Starlink ground station in Wola Krobowska, a village in the Masovian Voivodeship south of Warsaw, at approximately 21:00 local time on September 23, 2026, Notes From Poland and Euronews reported. AirVeto's archive shows the fire is the third suspected hybrid-warfare incident on Poland's eastern approach inside 48 hours.

A fire damaged a Starlink ground station south of Warsaw on the night of September 23

The fire "primarily involved the power station, the distribution board and a generator" at the site, Euronews reported. The station is owned by Exatel, Poland's state telecommunications operator, and carries internet transmission through Poland and on to Ukraine alongside SpaceX's Starlink service. Notes From Poland reported that a sister station in Lithuania serves the wider Central and Eastern Europe region alongside it. Deputy Prime Minister and Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said the Wola Krobowska station was still operational after the fire.

Polish officials called it sabotage before investigators finished their work

Notes From Poland quoted Gawkowski telling TVN "the modus operandi in this case is clearly Russian" and that the fire "is another element of the hybrid warfare we are facing." Special-services spokesman Jacek Dobrzyński was more measured: "everything points to arson," he said, while cautioning "it is still too early to talk about the causes or motives of this fire."

Prime Minister Donald Tusk was more guarded still. The fire "doesn't look good," he said, per UA.News, while declining to declare sabotage without full certainty.

Police, the Internal Security Agency, military counterintelligence and prosecutors in Radom are now investigating, RMF24 reported, and officers found a bottle of flammable substance near the burned-out control box that one likened to a Molotov cocktail. No source has confirmed whether the fire was arson or an electrical fault; that question remains open.

This is the third suspected hybrid-warfare incident on Poland's eastern approach in 48 hours

AirVeto has separately reconstructed two other suspected hybrid-warfare incidents on Poland's eastern border in the same window. Polish radar tracked an object approaching from Kaliningrad toward Malbork on September 22 before the signal vanished. A Russian Mi-8 helicopter then crossed briefly into Polish airspace near Braniewo from Kaliningrad on September 23; Poland scrambled fighter jets in response. Combined with the Starlink station fire the same night, that puts three separate suspected hybrid-warfare events on or near Poland's Kaliningrad-facing border within 48 hours. No official source has linked the three as a coordinated campaign, and this brief does not either; the pattern is AirVeto's own dated cross-reference of three incidents it has individually sourced and reconstructed.

The Starlink fire also follows the Preilack substation sabotage in Germany on September 1. That was a different country and a different kind of facility, but the same broad pattern of suspected ground-infrastructure sabotage tied to the war in Ukraine.

Why a Starlink station matters more than an ordinary infrastructure target

Starlink terminals have been central to Ukraine's wartime connectivity since 2022, and the Wola Krobowska station is one of the ground facilities that routes that traffic. But the station is not solely a Ukraine link: it also carries connectivity for the surrounding Polish region and wider Central and Eastern Europe, per Notes From Poland's reporting. That dual role, not the scale of the damage, is what officials pointed to when calling the station a plausible target rather than the site of a random fire - Exatel said no infrastructure was destroyed and the station stayed operational.

What this does and does not tell us

No perpetrator has been confirmed. Polish officials have said Russia is the likely author, but that is an attributed claim from Gawkowski, not an established fact. The fire's precise cause, arson versus an electrical fault, is still under investigation as of publication; the flammable-liquid bottle reported near the distribution board is evidence cited toward sabotage, not a closed finding. AirVeto has no independent verification of the fire beyond the cited reporting.

AirVeto's live map tracks airspace and border incidents across the EU's eastern border as they're reconstructed.