Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Thursday that authorities had foiled a Russian-directed plot to kill a Ukrainian American citizen in Warsaw, describing the operation as unprecedented in its targeting of a US national on NATO soil. A Russian suspect, allegedly recruited by Russia's secret services, was detained by Polish authorities on 7 August. He will be held in custody for three months, according to Warsaw police.
Tusk said the targeted individual held both Ukrainian and US passports and was "inconvenient to the Putin regime", though he declined to elaborate on the person's identity or the specific reasons they were considered a threat to Moscow. The operation was carried out in close cooperation with American intelligence services, according to Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland's minister overseeing intelligence services. "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 at a news conference. The Russian foreign ministry and the Russian embassy in Warsaw did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while the US State Department said it was aware of the reports but had no additional information.
Tusk described the incident as the first known case of Russia ordering an attack on a US citizen in another NATO member state — a significant escalation in a pattern of alleged Russian covert operations across Europe. Western intelligence officials have documented roughly 200 acts of sabotage, arson, and other disruption across the continent since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which they attribute to Moscow. Putin told the Associated Press in June that Russia was not waging a sabotage campaign against Europe.
The alleged plot fits a broader pattern of targeted killings that Western governments have linked to the Kremlin. Notable past cases include the 2006 poisoning with radioactive polonium of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, the 2018 nerve-agent attack on former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, and the 2019 shooting of a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park. More recently, in June 2025, Russian artist Robert Kuzovkov — known by the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky — was shot dead near his home in eastern Poland in what Tusk called a likely political assassination, though Polish authorities have not yet formally attributed the killing to Moscow.
Poland, a NATO and EU member state bordering Ukraine, has increasingly found itself a focal point of Russian espionage and alleged interference, in part because of its central role as a logistics and supply hub for Ukrainian war efforts. "We must assume that the Putin regime will try to eliminate people who are inconvenient for various reasons, in various places around the world," Tusk warned, adding that Warsaw would likely face similar pressure again. Senior European intelligence officials have characterised this campaign as neither accidental nor opportunistic, saying there is clear political authorisation at the highest levels of the Russian state.