Poland Says It Foiled Russian Plot to Kill Ukrainian American in Warsaw

WARSAW, Poland —

Poland arrested a Russian citizen accused of planning to kill a Ukrainian American dual national in Warsaw, Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced Thursday. Tusk said Polish security services stopped the plot just before it could be carried out.

The suspect was detained on August 7 and will be held in custody for three months, according to a statement from Warsaw police. Tusk said the man had been recruited by Russia's secret services and that the intended target, a U.S. citizen of Ukrainian origin, was "inconvenient" to the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He did not identify the target or say how the plot was supposed to unfold.

"At the last minute, thanks to the action of the Internal Security Agency and the police, we managed to prevent this execution, this attack," Tusk said, according to Al Jazeera. He called it the first known case of someone acting on Russian orders trying to attack a U.S. citizen inside another NATO member country, and described it as a "very dangerous signal."

Tomasz Siemoniak, the Polish minister who oversees intelligence services, said the operation to stop the plot was carried out with cooperation from American authorities. The U.S. State Department said it was aware of the reports but had no additional information to share. The Russian foreign ministry and the Russian embassy in Warsaw did not respond to requests for comment, according to The Guardian and France 24.

A pattern across Europe

Tusk connected the arrest to a broader campaign he said Russia has waged against people it considers threats. "We have to accept the assumption that the Putin regime will try to eliminate people who are inconvenient for various reasons, in various places around the world," he said, adding that Poland and other countries need to be ready to counter it.

The Associated Press has linked roughly 200 acts of sabotage and arson across Europe to Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, according to The Guardian. Past cases include the 2006 polonium poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, the 2018 nerve agent attack on former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, and the 2019 killing of a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park. Authorities in France, Lithuania and Germany have also broken up plots in recent years targeting Russian dissidents and people tied to Ukraine's war effort.

Poland on edge

In June, a Russian artist and Putin critic living in Poland, Robert Kuzovkov, was shot and killed near his home in the eastern town of Biala Podlaska. Tusk said at the time the killing looked like a political assassination, though Polish officials have not formally blamed Moscow. Poland arrested a man in 2024 accused of plotting to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a Russian helicopter pilot who had defected was killed in Spain that same year, with Russian operatives named as the main suspects.