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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.
Poland has detained and charged three Ukrainians whose car was found, during a traffic stop, to contain an array of computer hacking equipment. Among the offences they are accused of is threatening Poland’s national security.
Police in Warsaw announced details of the incident on Monday, though they did not reveal when it had taken place. Officers carrying out a traffic stop in the city centre had found three Ukrainian citizens, aged 43, 42 and 39, travelling in a car.
The men, who “were visibly agitated”, told police that they were “travelling around Europe” and had arrived in Poland a few hours earlier, with plans to soon move on to neighbouring Lithuania.
Officers then decided to search the vehicle, which revealed equipment that could “be used to interfere with the country’s strategic IT systems [and] break into telecommunications networks”.
W rozmowie z policjantami przyznali, że do Polski przyjechali kilka godzin wcześniej i niedługo planują podróż na Litwę | @Defence24pl @Policja_KSP @CyberDefence24https://t.co/Ih8qjzry3j
— InfoSecurity24.pl (@InfoSecurity_24) December 8, 2025
The items included Flipper hacking equipment, antennas, laptops, a large number of SIM cards, routers, portable hard drives, cameras and what police described as a “spying device detector”.
Under subsequent questioning, “the Ukrainians were unable to determine the purpose of possessing the items”, said the police. “They claimed to be IT specialists, but when asked more specific questions, they forgot their English and pretended not to understand what was being said.”
After the evidence was passed on to prosecutors, they charged the men with various offences relating to “fraud, computer fraud, and obtaining devices and computer programs adapted for committing crimes, including damaging computer data of particular importance to national defence”, say the police.
A court has also approved a request from prosecutors for the men to be held in pretrial detention, for an initial period of three months.
Poland’s government says the security services have in recent days “broken up a group of saboteurs” working on behalf of Russia and Belarus who were targeting Polish institutions with the aim of "extorting information and waging de facto cyberwarfare” https://t.co/b9F7nemxg5
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 9, 2024
The Polish authorities have not revealed any information on the specific nature of the crimes the men are accused of, nor on whose behalf they were carrying them out.
Asked about the case, interior minister Marcin Kierwiński told reports that he would not yet comment on it. But he noted that “arrests related to acts of sabotage have been happening almost daily for the past two weeks”, reports broadcaster TVN.
Poland has in recent years been hit by a wave of sabotage and espionage activities, including cyberattacks, orchestrated by Russia and in many cases carried out by Ukrainians recruited by the Russian security services.
However, there is currently no suggestion that the men detained in Warsaw were working on behalf of a foreign state.
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: Śródmieście Policja
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.
