Polish man suspected of helping Russian plot to assassinate Zelensky sentenced to 5.5 years

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

A Polish man has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for spying on behalf of Russia. The tasks assigned to him included reconnaissance of Rzeszów-Jasionka airport as part of a possible plan to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while he travelled through Poland.

The sentence was handed down by the court of appeal in Lublin on Thursday, increasing by two years a jail term issued by a lower court earlier this year. The ruling is now final and binding.

The 51-year-old former Polish soldier, who has been named only as Paweł K. under privacy law, was detained by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW) in April 2024.

Investigators found that the suspect had declared his willingness to collaborate with Russian intelligence and, between December 2022 and March 2024, had established contact via email and instant messaging with Russians involved in military operations against Ukraine, including army officers.

Prosecutors determined that Paweł K. had been assigned tasks including gathering and transmitting information regarding security at Rzeszów airport, which is the main hub for goods and people being transported in and out of Ukraine.

“These activities could have been used by Russian intelligence services, including in the context of planning a possible assassination attempt on the head of a foreign state, that is, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky,” wrote Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office earlier this year.

Last year, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that Paweł K. had been “recruited decades ago and firmly believed in the Soviet cause”. Polish prosecutors have not commented on that claim.

However, they did find that the suspect had declared his willingness to join Russian “sabotage structures”, including the Wagner mercenary group and Unit 29155 of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, which is tasked with carrying out destabilisation activities.

Paweł G. denied the accusations against him and claimed that he had actually been trying to help capture Russian war criminals by deceiving them into trusting him, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

His defence attorney argued that the information Paweł G. had transmitted regarding Rzeszów airport was “trivial and publicly available”, according to news website Onet.

In January this year, Paweł K. was found guilty of espionage and illegal possession of ammunition by the district court in the city of Zamość, which sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.

However, prosecutors appealed against that ruling, arguing that the suspect deserved a longer jail term of seven and a half years. In a judgement issued on Thursday, the Lublin appeals court agreed that Paweł G’s initial sentence had been “grossly lenient” and increased it by two years, reports PAP.

“Submitting an offer to work for…the intelligence service of a country that is at war with a country directly neighboring Poland, a country that is making quite extensive unfriendly gestures towards Poland, cannot be treated leniently,” said judge Artur Achrymowicz.

Poland has become a primary target for acts of espionage, sabotage and disinformation conducted by operatives working on behalf of Russia.

In many cases, they are so-called “disposable agents”: individuals already on the ground, often amateurs hired and paid through messaging apps such as Telegram, rather than professional spies or soldiers.

The AWB last year launched 48 investigations related to espionage, more than twice as many as in 2024. Over those two years, there were more espionage investigations than over the previous three decades combined

A report published earlier this year by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism found that Poland is the “primary focus” of Russia’s sabotage operations in Europe.

In January, Polish prosecutors indicted five people – four Ukrainian citizens and one Russian – accused of carrying out a plot on behalf of Russia to plant explosives in packages that were then dispatched by courier services across Europe.

In April, prosecutors charged a soldier from Poland’s Territorial Defence Force with seeking to spy on behalf of Russia. The following month, three Polish citizens were charged with working on behalf of Russian intelligence to spread disinformation and conduct reconnaissance of NATO troops.

In July this year, a Russian married couple who had been studying in Poland were jailed for spying on behalf of Moscow and involvement in a plot to send a parcel bomb.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Presidential Office of Ukraine (under CC BY-NC ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.