Warsaw: Russia Ordered Hit on American in Poland

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Thursday, August 13, that Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) and police had arrested a Russian national in Warsaw a week earlier, on August 7, on suspicion of plotting to kill a US citizen of Ukrainian descent. Serbia is not mentioned anywhere in the case, but the question it raises reaches Belgrade too: how safe is a person Moscow finds inconvenient once he sets foot on European soil, and does it matter that one country, Poland, belongs to NATO while another, Serbia, is militarily neutral.

Tusk announced the operation six days after it took place. Polish authorities did not release the name of the intended target, did not describe any detail of the plot, and did not say how long the suspect had been under surveillance before his arrest. The only thing the prime minister said about the man who was meant to be attacked was that he had “been inconvenient for Putin’s regime.”

Tusk described the outcome of the operation to reporters like this:

At the last moment, thanks to the action of the Internal Security Agency and the police, we managed to prevent this execution, this attack.

The prime minister thanked Poland’s security services and called the whole case a very dangerous signal. Poland says the suspect was recruited by Russian intelligence services, and Tomasz Siemoniak, the minister coordinating the special services, confirmed the operation was carried out together with American services and that the target was a US citizen of Ukrainian descent. Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the case.

Why does Warsaw call this the first case of its kind?

Because, in Poland’s account of events, three elements come together for the first time: an order from Russia, an American citizen as the target, and the territory of a NATO member as the place of execution. Tusk put it precisely.

This is the first situation of its kind in which someone, acting on Russian orders, decided to carry out an attack on a US citizen on the territory of another NATO member.

That statement carries weight the operation itself would not have on its own. Attacks on Russian dissidents abroad are nothing new, and Tusk himself recalled that similar cases had happened in Britain, Germany and Lithuania. What sets Warsaw’s case apart is the target’s nationality, since a successful attack on an American in a country that belongs to both NATO and the European Union would be an incident involving an ally Washington is obligated to look out for.

Poland has been reporting incidents for a second year running

Poland, which sits on the alliance’s eastern flank and borders Belarus, Russia’s Kaliningrad region and Ukraine, has repeatedly accused Moscow of sabotage on its territory since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. Tusk named two cases himself:

• in June 2026, Russian cartoonist and Kremlin critic Robert Kuzovkov, who signed his work under the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, was killed in eastern Poland, a killing the prime minister later called political
• in November 2025, an explosion damaged a rail line running from Warsaw toward the southeast of the country, a line Tusk said at the time was carrying aid to Ukraine

Moscow has consistently denied any involvement in attacks of this kind, as it has in every earlier case in European countries.

What comes next after the arrest

Tusk said Warsaw has to expect it will again face similar pressure, and that Putin’s regime will keep trying to eliminate people who are inconvenient to it for one reason or another. Politically, that was the most important part of his remarks: Poland is not treating the arrest as an isolated case but as a recurring pattern.

It is not yet known exactly what criminal charge the suspect faces, which court is handling the case, or when proceedings might begin. Officials in Warsaw have not released those details, so the only information publicly known is the outline of the case: one arrest date, one suspect’s nationality, and a claim that the order came from outside Poland’s borders.