Poland raises alert level for offshore energy infrastructure over “increased terrorist threat”

Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has signed an order raising the alert level for Polish energy infrastructure outside the country’s borders to respond to “an increased and foreseeable threat of terrorism”.

The decision comes in the wake of recent explosions that damaged the two Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, which are located close to Polish energy infrastructure, including a new pipeline bringing gas from Norway.

Today’s decision raised Poland’s threat status to BRAVO, the second level on a four-tier scale. It is “introduced when there is an increased and foreseeable threat of a terrorist event”, explained the Government Security Centre (RCB).

The decision “means that the services have information about a potential threat, and therefore the public administration is obliged to be particularly vigilant”, the RCB added. The new raised security status will remain in place until the end of November.

The decision comes after explosions damaged the Nord Stream pipelines, which bring Russian gas to Germany, on Monday last week. A day later, Morawiecki was one of the first world leaders to declare the incident to be a likely deliberate act of sabotage, a position later adopted by others, including the United States.

On Thursday, Morawiecki announced that “according to information which we receive from our friends abroad, it was most likely the work of Russia’s [special] services”.

The explosions occurred just a day before Poland symbolically opened the Baltic Pipe, a flagship government project intended to help achieve independence from Russian energy resources. Two of the blasts happened close to a submarine electricity line linking Poland and Sweden.

None of Poland’s infrastructure was damaged. But last week three opposition parties called on President Andrzej Duda to convene the National Security Council in order to discuss the security of the Baltic Pipe.

Main image credit: Baltic Pipe project press kit

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.