The sabotage of a key railway line linking Warsaw with Lublin has moved Poland’s security debate from the abstract to the immediate, and renewed questions about whether Europe is treating Russia’s hybrid campaign as a real war rather than a peripheral threat.
In the early hours of 16 November, an explosive device detonated on the Warsaw–Lublin route near the village of Mika, on a line that forms part of a strategic corridor for military and civilian traffic to Ukraine. Subsequent inspections revealed further tampering with the track and associated infrastructure.
According to Polish authorities, the aim was not simple disruption but the deliberate creation of a rail catastrophe. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has told parliament that two Ukrainian nationals, allegedly working for Russian intelligence and now in Belarus, are suspected of carrying out the attack. Polish and allied services are treating the incident as part of a broader pattern of Russian-linked sabotage, arson and cyber operations across Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
What prevented mass casualties appears to have been a combination of luck and vigilance. One of the explosive charges reportedly failed to detonate, while a train driver noticed severe damage to the track in time to brake and halt a passenger service carrying several hundred people. Earlier trains are believed to have passed the damaged section without incident.
Polish commentator Bartosz Wieliński, writing in Gazeta Wyborcza, argues that this episode marks “another line crossed” in Russia’s campaign against European infrastructure, and questions whether it still makes sense to speak of “only” a hybrid war. His analysis echoes concerns in Western intelligence assessments that railways, energy systems, communications networks and financial services have become systematic targets rather than occasional collateral damage.
The Mika attack did not occur in isolation. On the night of 9–10 September, between 19 and 23 Russian drones entered Polish airspace during a large-scale strike on Ukraine. NATO aircraft were scrambled; several drones were shot down, debris fell across eastern and central Poland, and at least one residential building suffered damage. Warsaw responded by invoking Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, triggering consultations on allied security.
Taken together, the drone incursion and the rail sabotage have strengthened the view in Warsaw and other European capitals that Poland is not merely a rear-area logistics hub for Ukraine but itself a front-line state in a wider confrontation. Wieliński and other analysts argue that the war “in Ukraine” is, in practice, also a war affecting Poland and the European Union as a whole, even if no formal declaration has been made.
The domestic political reaction, however, has been fragmented. Former ministers from the Law and Justice (PiS) government have used the incident to attack the current cabinet, while politicians from the far-right Confederation party have gone so far as to suggest Ukrainian involvement, despite the broader context of Russian operations against Poland. Wieliński warns that such disputes risk doing Moscow’s work by eroding public trust and obscuring the nature of the threat.
Behind this political argument lies a more structural concern: whether Poland’s civilian and military leadership has fully internalised the scale and persistence of the threat. The rail line targeted at Mika is one of several critical routes linking Poland with Ukraine. Other potential points of vulnerability include rail junctions, bridges, power distribution nodes, communications hubs and border crossings in the area where the frontiers of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus meet. Polish officials have already announced expanded inspections of a 120-kilometre stretch of track leading towards the Ukrainian border.
Security specialists argue that narrow technical measures will not be sufficient. They point to the need for continuous monitoring of key infrastructure, visible security posts at bridges and rail choke points, rapid-response patrols, and better integration between rail operators, intelligence agencies and local police. They also highlight the importance of public awareness: citizens need to know which authorities to contact if they notice unexplained works near tracks, suspicious devices or unusual activity around energy or communications facilities.
The Mika case has also revived calls in Warsaw for sustained NATO-level discussions under Article 4, not only as a diplomatic signal but as a framework for practical cooperation on counter-sabotage, air defence and protection of critical infrastructure across the alliance’s eastern flank. Supporters of this approach argue that isolated national measures will struggle to keep pace with a threat that operates across borders and domains.
At strategic level, European military and political planners increasingly see hybrid operations as a precursor, not an alternative, to more open confrontation. Analysts caution that repeated failures to respond effectively to sabotage, cyberattacks or airspace violations may encourage further escalation. In this reading, the question posed in Gazeta Wyborcza – whether hybrid war is “still” ongoing or has already moved into a new phase – is less theoretical than it appears. The answer may depend on how quickly European states adapt their security practices to a reality in which railways, cables and drone incursions are treated not as anomalies but as elements of a continuous campaign.
