INVESTIGATION: Murder of a Russian dissident in Poland — Moscow strikes at the heart of Europe

An assassination that shook Western capitals

On June 8, 2026, Semyon Skrepetsky, a 44-year-old Russian dissident, was shot dead in a city in eastern Poland, near the Belarusian border. This was not an accident, not an ordinary crime. It was an execution — methodical, targeted, precise. Donald Tusk, Poland's Prime Minister, did not mince words: he raised the possibility of the first case of "state terrorism" perpetrated in Europe. A Georgian passport holder was arrested. Suspicion converged immediately on Moscow.

Fifteen days later, on June 23, 2026, EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius sounded the alarm in a landmark statement: "There could be more such attacks — and even worse ones — not just in Ukraine but also in Europe." This was not a warning from a policy fiction novel. It was a concrete intelligence-based alert from a man with access to the most sensitive files in European security.

Why this assassination changes everything

For years, killings of Russian dissidents — Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015, Sergei Skripal poisoned in Salisbury in 2018 — took place either inside Russia or in the United Kingdom, where Russian services seemed willing to operate despite the diplomatic risks. Poland, a NATO member state on the eastern edge of the Alliance, marks a further escalation. It is a deliberate signal: Moscow no longer hesitates, not even in the countries of the Atlantic Alliance.

For Warsaw, this execution on its territory is not merely a crime — it is an act of low-grade warfare. The Polish government's response was commensurate with the stakes: summoning the Russian ambassador, immediate coordination with NATO allies, and a deliberately firm public statement characterizing the act as state terrorism. Poland refused to let it pass without consequences.

I have not forgotten Salisbury. I have not forgotten the dozens of Russian opposition figures who have died in suspicious circumstances over twenty years. Each time, we hope it will be the last. Each time, Moscow does it again — a little further, a little more brazenly. Poland is a new line crossed. The question is: what response will actually deter the next one?

A Georgian passport, a trail leading back to the Kremlin

The arrest of an individual carrying a Georgian passport is itself revealing. Georgia has become, since the invasion of Ukraine, a preferred transit territory for Russian agents and operations seeking to conceal their origins. Thousands of Russian nationals have fled to Tbilisi since 2022, and Georgian intelligence services have documented the use of their country as a rear base for FSB and GRU operations targeting dissidents in Europe.

Using a Georgian passport as cover is a classic Russian intelligence tradecraft move. The GRU used falsified Russian passports in Salisbury, but the lesson was learned: since then, operatives use third-country documents, harder to link directly to Moscow. Georgia, whose relations with Russia are complex and whose current government maintains ambivalent ties with Putin, offers a particularly convenient cover identity.

The presumed chain of command

Polish authorities suspect an operation orchestrated by Moscow. This type of operation is not improvised. It requires infrastructure: case officers, logistical networks, financing channels, and cover identity pipelines. The presence of such a setup near the Belarusian border — which has been, since 2022, a high-tension zone with Russian troop movements and the instrumentalization of migration by Lukashenko — is not accidental.

Belarus has become a vector for Russian hybrid operations against Poland and the Baltic states. Choosing to strike in a city near that border may be an additional signal: Moscow is using its satellite territory as a launching pad for its most high-risk operations on NATO soil.

A Georgian passport, a city near the Belarusian border. Moscow builds its operations like plausibly deniable puzzles. But the plausibility is thinner and more cynical each time. We know. They know we know. They do not care. That is the real message.

Kubilius and the June 23 warning

The statement by EU Commissioner Andrius Kubilius on June 23, 2026 is a major political document. In asserting that similar or worse attacks could occur "not just in Ukraine but also in Europe," he shattered an implicit taboo — the one that wanted Russian state violence to remain confined to the post-Soviet space. Kubilius, a Lithuanian who lived under Soviet occupation, knows exactly what he is saying — and what he is committing to by saying it publicly.

This warning came in a context where multiple EU member states had already documented attempted Russian hybrid operations on their soil. Le Monde reported in June 2026 multiple cases in France. El País documented "Putin's invisible front" across Europe. The Guardian reported Russian provocations in the Baltic states. Skrepetsky's murder is not an isolated incident — it is the visible apex of an iceberg of underground operations.

The limits of current response mechanisms

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, at the EU Council, called for increased pressure on Russia. The rhetoric was firm. But the European institutional reality is more constrained: decisions on foreign policy and defense require unanimity, and some member states — including Orbán's Hungary — regularly block the most binding measures.

The EU Council extended its restrictive measures against Russian hybrid threats on June 17, 2026 until October 9, 2026, targeting 47 individuals and 15 entities. That is a signal, but a limited one. None of the alleged masterminds of Skrepetsky's killing appeared at that stage on those sanctions lists.

The European institutional response is always too slow, too timid, too conditioned by the lowest common denominator. While Brussels negotiates its sanctions lists, Moscow sends the next agent. That tempo gap is one of Russia's structural advantages against democracies that must persuade before they act.

The documented hybrid escalation

The murder of Semyon Skrepetsky fits into a documented wave of Russian hybrid operations across Europe in 2025–2026. In Sweden, two Russia-linked espionage cases emerged in June 2026: a Swedish military consultant indicted, and a 34-year-old man arrested after meeting FSB agents in Moscow in November 2025. In Germany, the June 24, 2026 raids targeted an alleged gas supply sabotage operation. In France, espionage and sabotage attempts were documented.

This is not a coincidence. It is a program. Western intelligence services — notably the Five Eyes and their European partners — have documented a deliberate acceleration of Russian hybrid operations since the start of 2026, running parallel to Moscow's attempts to force peace negotiations on its own terms in Ukraine. Pressure on the European home front is a component of the overall Russian strategy.

The Polish-Belarusian border zone, hub of hostile operations

The border zone between Poland and Belarus has been, since 2021, an open-air hybrid warfare space. The Lukashenko regime's weaponization of migrants, drone crossings, forest incidents involving armed groups — all of this has created fertile ground for clandestine operations. Poland has massively reinforced its border guard deployments and surveillance capabilities there, but a border stretching hundreds of kilometers cannot be hermetically sealed.

It is in this context that Skrepetsky's murder takes its full geographic meaning. It did not happen in Warsaw, at a visible café in the spotlight. It happened in a quiet eastern city, close to a transit corridor that hostile agents already use. The choice of location was operational, not coincidental.

The Polish-Belarusian border has become a grey zone — neither open war nor peace. Russian agents move through it, drones transit it, migrants are weaponized across it. And now a man has died there. Poland is on the front line of a war that Europe has not yet fully recognized as such.

A community under permanent surveillance

Tens of thousands of dissidents, journalists, activists, and political opponents have fled Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine. They settled in Poland, the Baltic states, Germany, Georgia, and Armenia. Many continue their work — spreading information, maintaining opposition networks, documenting Russian war crimes. And many know they are under surveillance.

Russian intelligence services — the FSB, the GRU, the SVR — maintained their surveillance operations against the hostile diaspora even during wartime. Agents infiltrated into exile communities, targeted cyberattacks, pressure on families left behind in Russia — the harassment is continuous. Did Semyon Skrepetsky know the full scope of the danger he faced? We do not know with certainty.

The responsibility of host states

Skrepetsky's murder raises an uncomfortable question for the states that host Russian dissidents: what real protection are they actually providing? The Baltic states and Poland, who understand Russian methods better than anyone, have developed relatively advanced protection protocols. But resources are limited, and it is impossible to physically protect every individual dissident against a state intelligence service with near-unlimited resources.

This case argues for a coordinated European approach to protecting dissidents, journalists, and at-risk activists targeted by hostile governments. The EU has instruments in the field of human rights — subsidiary protection status, notably — but nothing resembling a physical protection program worthy of the name for people threatened by adversarial states.

We welcome dissidents, celebrate their courage, broadcast their testimonies. And then? We leave them to manage with a discreet address in a provincial city, hoping Moscow will not find them. That is not a protection policy. It is a bare-minimum policy in the face of a lethal threat.

Toward an offensive counter-espionage doctrine?

The repeated warnings from Andrius Kubilius and Baltic defense ministers point toward a necessary reorientation of European security doctrine. NATO is well equipped to respond to conventional military aggression — Article 5 mechanisms were calibrated for that. But for hybrid operations below the Article 5 threshold, the collective response is far less clear.

Several member states are pushing for the development of a European offensive counter-intelligence capability — the capacity to proactively detect, expose, and neutralize Russian operations, rather than merely reacting after the fact. This implies levels of cooperation between national intelligence services that currently remain incomplete.

The signal sent to neighboring democracies

Beyond purely security questions, Skrepetsky's murder sends a political message to the democracies neighboring Russia: no one is safe, not even under the theoretical protection of NATO. This message is deliberate. Putin wants European leaders to know that the price of supporting Ukraine and hosting Russian dissidents can be paid in blood on their own territory.

The right response to that message is not capitulation or silence — on the contrary, it is strengthening solidarity, raising the cost for Moscow of each operation, and making a clear public declaration that democracies will not accept this regime of state terror in silence. Poland, by publicly characterizing the facts as state terrorism, made the right political call.

Putin plays on fear. It is his oldest method — intimidate, deter, plant doubt. If Europe retreats, self-censors, refuses to host new dissidents for fear of reprisals, then he has won without needing to fire a single additional missile. The response must be exactly the opposite: more welcome, more support, more visibility for those who resist.

A frontline country that holds

Poland is today one of the most exposed countries to the Russian threat in Europe — and one of the most resolved to face it. With the highest defense spending as a share of GDP in NATO (over 4%), accelerated modernization of its armed forces, and a resolutely Atlanticist foreign policy under the Tusk government, Warsaw positions itself as a pillar of resistance to Russian aggression.

The murder of Skrepetsky on Polish soil will not shake that determination — on the contrary. It legitimizes every zloty spent on defense, every difficult decision taken on managing the Belarusian border, every call to increase pressure on Moscow. Poland has the advantage of having never harbored illusions about the nature of the Russian regime — and that painful clarity is now an asset for all of Europe.

Regional coordination against a common threat

The Baltic Sea countries — Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden — have developed enhanced security cooperation since 2022, aware that they form the first line against Russian expansionism. The Polish White Paper on Russian acts of sabotage against Council of the Baltic Sea States members, presented to EU ministers in June 2026, is a concrete example of this pooling of analysis.

This regional cooperation is a model the rest of Europe should be eager to replicate. The countries living in direct contact with the Russian threat have developed expertise and resilience that their Western European partners still have much to learn from.

Poland has suffered at Russia's hands for centuries. It has not forgotten. And that is precisely why it is today the most clear-eyed European country about what Putin truly represents. Listening to Warsaw is not anti-Russian ideology — it is foreign policy grounded in historical experience. Experience that comes at a steep price.

Strengthening dissident protection protocols

Skrepetsky's death demands an urgent review of protection protocols for Russian dissidents in Europe. Several democracies have begun developing specific frameworks for persons under hostile state threat, but these arrangements remain fragmentary and uneven across countries. The EU should draw on the Israeli protection model for high-value targets to build a coordinated European program.

The question of resources must also be addressed: providing physical protection for tens of thousands of potentially targeted dissidents across Europe would require considerable human and financial resources. That is not a reason for inaction — it is a reason to prioritize, concentrate resources on the most exposed profiles, and coordinate efforts at the European level rather than duplicating them nationally.

Targeted sanctions and public attribution

Public attribution of acts of state terrorism is an underused deterrence tool. When the British government publicly attributed the Skripal poisoning to GRU agents in 2018, the political impact was real, even though Russia denied it. But attribution stopped at the operational agents — it never truly reached the masterminds at the top of the FSB or Kremlin hierarchy.

For the Skrepetsky case, Poland and its partners should push for rapid, public, and collegial attribution by allied governments, followed by personal sanctions against identified individuals within the Russian security apparatus. It is slow, difficult, politically costly — but it is the only language Putin understands.

Public attribution is not symbolic revenge. It is a strategic tool. When masterminds know that their name will end up on an international sanctions list, that their assets abroad will be frozen, that their children will no longer be able to study at Western universities — the calculation changes. Perhaps not for Putin himself, but for the FSB officers who carry out his orders.

What Skrepetsky's murder demands

The death of Semyon Skrepetsky is not merely a crime. It is a foreign policy declaration by Moscow, formulated in lead rather than diplomacy. It says: we can reach you anywhere in Europe. It says: your NATO passports do not protect you. It says: the price of opposing Putin is death, even in exile.

Europe's response must be equal to that challenge. This is not about starting a war — no one wants that. It is about making every Russian operation on European soil so costly, so risky, so thoroughly documented and exposed, that Moscow recalculates its equation. That requires intelligence cooperation, targeted sanctions, reinforced protection of dissidents, and uncompromising public communication about the nature of the regime ordering these acts.

Skrepetsky's memory as a commitment

We do not yet know everything about Semyon Skrepetsky — who he was, what precise threat he posed to Moscow, what networks he had built. But we know what his murder represents: a man who chose freedom and died for it. That death must not remain a footnote in geopolitical analysis.

Europe owes him — and all those who risk their lives to oppose tyranny — the seriousness of taking Kubilius's warning to heart. Not rhetorically. Institutionally, in budgetary terms, operationally. The next victim may already be designated in some FSB dossier. There is still time to act.

Europe remembers Sarajevo 1914 — an assassination that changed the world. I am not predicting a world war. But I am saying that unsanctioned acts of state terrorism create dangerous precedents. Every act of impunity invites the next operation. Skrepetsky's memory deserves a response that breaks that cycle.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

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