Russia closes Polish consulate in St Petersburg and expels diplomats

Russia has ordered the closure of Poland’s consulate in the city of Saint Petersburg and has expelled three diplomats working there. The decision was made in retaliation for Poland’s closure of a Russian consulate last month, which was itself motivated by Russian sabotage actions in Poland.

In a statement on Thursday, the Russian foreign ministry announced that it had delivered a formal diplomatic note to the Polish authorities informing them of the decision to withdraw consent for the operation of the consulate. The closure will take effect on 10 January 2025.

Moscow also declared three employees of the consulate as personae non grata, ordering them to leave the country by the same date.

The move underscores longstanding diplomatic tensions between the two nations, which soured even further after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Poland has been one of Kyiv’s closest allies and has regularly called for stronger international action against Moscow.

“In recent years, the Polish authorities have been pursuing an openly hostile policy towards Russia, have almost completely dismantled the architecture of Russian-Polish relations built over many decades, and openly declare the need to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ on our country,” wrote the Russian foreign ministry today.

“One of the manifestations of this anti-Russian course was the closure of the Russian consulate general in Poznań under a far-fetched pretext,” the Russian ministry said.

At the time of writing, the Polish authorities have not commented on Russia’s announcement.

In October, Poland announced the decision to close Russia’s consulate in Poznań and expel the diplomats working there. It said it was doing so in response to acts of sabotage and cyberwarfare being carried out by Moscow, which Warsaw said constituted “a form of hybrid warfare against Poland”.

In May, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk revealed that nine people had been charged on suspicion of acts of sabotage on behalf of the Kremlin. Among the incidents blamed on Russia was a fire that destroyed Warsaw’s largest shopping centre.

Poland has also accused Russia of being behind various acts of cyberwarfare against Polish institutions as well as the migration crisis on the border with Belarus.

In another sign of tense relations (although unrelated to the consulate’s closure), today Sikorski – along with some other delegates – walked out of a session of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Malta during a speech by his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

Sikorski accused Lavrov of coming to the meeting to “lie about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and declared that he “won’t listen to these lies”.

Sikorski later called for Russia’s suspension from the OSCE until the end of the war, accusing Moscow of destroying both Ukraine and its own future, reports broadcaster TVN24.

Main image credit: Cancillería Ecuador/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

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