Starlink Ground Sites Burned in Poland and Bulgaria 16 Days Apart; Four Arrested Across Two Cases

A fire at a Starlink facility near Sofia on October 9, 2026 destroyed 11 of its 17 antennas, according to the opposition alliance Democratic Bulgaria, and the head of the country's State Agency for National Security says he believes it was sabotage. The disclosure, reported by dpa, came 16 days after a fire at a Starlink ground station in Poland that prosecutors there are treating as arson.

The number that matters is the 11 of 17. Losing two-thirds of the antennas at one location is a large physical loss, though the dpa report does not say how much traffic the site carried or whether service was interrupted.

Two fires, two sites

	Poland	Bulgaria
Date	September 23, 2026	October 9, 2026
Location	Wola Krobowska, Masovian Voivodeship	Near Sofia
Damage	Not itemised in reports we fetched	11 of 17 antennas (Democratic Bulgaria's count)
Arrests	Two suspects, Nürtingen, Germany, Tuesday	Two German passport holders, aged 20 and 21, Monday
Official view	Arson, suspected Russian orders	Sabotage, per DANS head

What officials have said

In Poland, Przemysław Nowak, spokesperson for the National Prosecutor's Office, said the fire was caused by arson on the information then available, and that there are "reasonable grounds to suspect that the perpetrators acted on the orders of Russian secret services." He said the aim was to disrupt Starlink's operation and connectivity in Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries. On the Thursday after the fire he said "No one has been charged so far," per European Pravda's report, which cites the Polish news agency PAP. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said it "does not look good" but that he does not like to call something sabotage or an accident without certainty.

In Bulgaria, Prime Minister Rumen Radev confirmed a fire had occurred the previous week and withheld details because of the investigation, according to dpa. Plamen Tonchev, head of the State Agency for National Security (DANS), said he believes it was sabotage and that "Such acts of sabotage cannot be ruled out in the future either." Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev told parliament that extra security measures had been introduced at similar facilities.

The site is privately owned, dpa reports, and officials said that protecting it is the owners' responsibility. The report does not name the owner or the operator.

What is not established

The Bulgarian arrests are for two men with German passports who, per Faktor.bg as relayed by dpa, entered Bulgaria from Greece at the Kulata crossing. Investigators are checking whether they belong to a larger network. Nothing in the reports we fetched links the two cases beyond the timing, the target and the German arrests; the pro-Western opposition parties in Bulgaria suspect Russian involvement, and that remains a suspicion.

Neither report quotes SpaceX. The dpa piece says the Bulgarian antennas were used in the war in Ukraine, a detail that Democratic Bulgaria supplied and that we could not check independently.

The physical exposure here is the same one we traced in our reports on the Yandex data centre strikes and on the megaconstellation supply chain: a network that looks distributed from orbit rests on a modest number of ground sites on the surface, each with a fence and an owner.

What would change this read is a charge sheet. If prosecutors in either country file charges that name a common organiser, the two fires become one case; if they stay separate, the 16-day gap is a coincidence of targets. No charging date has been given.