Russia has announced it will close Poland’s consulate general in Irkutsk on 30 December, in a direct tit-for-tat response to Warsaw’s decision to shut down Russia’s last remaining consulate in Poland.
According to a note handed to Polish ambassador Krzysztof Krajewski, who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on 27 November, the move is explicitly framed as “retaliation” for Poland’s withdrawal of consent for the operation of the Russian consulate in Gdańsk as of 23 December 2025. The Russian side stressed that the closure mirrors Poland’s step and is part of a broader decision to limit Poland’s diplomatic and consular presence in Russia.
The escalation comes against the backdrop of an intensifying “shadow war” between the two countries. On 19 November, Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski announced that the Gdańsk consulate would be closed after an explosion on the Warsaw–Lublin railway line, which the authorities blame on Russian-backed saboteurs. Sikorski described the incident as an act of “state terrorism” whose clear intention was to cause civilian casualties, and warned that Russia’s campaign of sabotage, arson and cyberattacks in Poland had crossed a critical line.
The Gdańsk consulate was the last Russian consular post still operating in Poland. Earlier closures in Poznań and Kraków were also linked by Warsaw to operations attributed to Russian intelligence, including attempted and successful arson attacks on strategic and civilian infrastructure.
Moscow has been signalling for days that it would respond in kind. Russian officials accused Poland of “Russophobia” and of deliberately dismantling bilateral relations, promising to reduce Poland’s diplomatic footprint in Russia. Thursday’s decision to shut the Irkutsk consulate is the latest step in that direction. It follows earlier retaliatory measures: the closure of Poland’s consular agency in Smolensk in August 2023 and the shutdown of the Polish consulate in Kaliningrad in January 2025, after Poland ordered Russia’s consulate in Poznań to close.
Taken together, these moves mean that consular networks on both sides have been almost completely dismantled. After 30 December, Poland will effectively be represented in Russia only by its embassy in Moscow, while Russia will maintain just its embassy in Warsaw. Routine consular services for citizens – from visas and notarisation to emergency assistance across vast territories like Siberia – will become far more complicated, and will often require travel to the capitals.
Politically, the closure of the Irkutsk consulate underlines how far Poland–Russia relations have deteriorated since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Poland has become one of Kyiv’s key military and political backers and a major logistics hub for Western aid. At the same time, Polish authorities say they are facing a coordinated Russian hybrid campaign that includes sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation and the recruitment of local proxies. The recent railway blast near the line to Ukraine, for which several suspects have been identified, including Ukrainians allegedly working for Russian services, has reinforced that perception in Warsaw.
For Moscow, matching each Polish step with a reciprocal measure serves two purposes: it signals that Russia will not leave sanctions or expulsions unanswered, and it supports the official narrative that it is the victim of western “hostility” rather than the aggressor. For Polish authorities, consular closures are presented as part of a broader strategy of “raising the cost” of hostile actions and reducing the space in which Russian intelligence can operate under diplomatic cover.
The result is a relationship stripped down to the bare minimum of formal diplomatic contacts, dominated by mutual accusations of sabotage and state terror – and with ordinary citizens on both sides paying the price in the form of harder travel, weaker consular protection and almost no space left for normal people-to-people ties.
