Poland’s Internal Security Agency says two Turkish citizens suspected of setting fire to a Starlink satellite ground station in the Masovian Voivodeship have been detained in Germany under a European Arrest Warrant and are awaiting transfer to Poland. The men were detained on October 12, about a month after the fire, which Poland described at the time as a deliberate act of sabotage. Their identities have not been revealed.
Polish authorities link the attack to Russia and say its purpose was to disrupt internet services, including services used by Ukraine’s military. Starlink has been a core part of Ukraine’s communications infrastructure since 2022, and its ground infrastructure, along with data centers and telecoms assets on both sides, has been repeatedly targeted during the war.
The arrests matter for infrastructure operators beyond this one site. Satellite ground stations are comparatively exposed facilities, often in rural locations with limited physical security, and a confirmed sabotage prosecution gives insurers, regulators and operators a concrete case when pricing and hardening that exposure.
The case also sits next to, but is distinct from, the Starlink service restrictions story covered on October 14, in which Ukraine said throttling measures disrupted missions. One is about access policy, the other about physical attack; together they show the same network being squeezed at two different layers in the same week.