Poland’s ABW counterintelligence service is investigating whether an overnight fire at a WB Electronics plant that makes drone parts for the Polish and Ukrainian militaries was set on purpose. The fire started at roughly 12:23 a.m. Monday in a warehouse and production building in Skarzysko-Kamienna, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of Warsaw. Firefighters had it out inside two hours. The building was closed and nobody was hurt.

An intrusion alarm went off at the site around the same time, and a monitoring operator at an outside security company called police. ABW officers arrived after the fire crews. The district prosecutor’s office in Skarzysko-Kamienna is supervising the case, and police have not ruled out arson.

WB Group, the plant’s owner and Poland’s largest private defense company, called the fire minor and said the site will restart once formalities are finished. Jacek Dobrzynski, spokesman for Poland’s special services coordinator, took a different tone, telling broadcaster TVN24 that officers are working out whether this counts as sabotage and cautioning the public against disinformation while they do it. In March, DroneXL covered a near-identical case in Czechia, where masked attackers burned a plant making thermal sights for Ukrainian troops.

The Fire Began In A Warehouse Building With Nobody Inside

The blaze broke out around 12:23 a.m. local time on Monday, August 31, in a warehouse and production building at the Skarzysko-Kamienna site. Five fire crews answered the call, per Radio Kielce. Firefighters cut power to the building and had the fire out inside two hours, then ventilated the smoke and swept the structure with detectors for hazardous substances.

State Fire Service spokesman Rafal Maciejczak described the fire as relatively small, per Polish Radio. WB Group said much the same in its own statement, quoted by TVP Info: “All procedures and safety systems worked as they should.” The company said damage to its infrastructure is still being tallied and gave no date for the restart.

The detail that pulled the special services in came from elsewhere. Onet reported, without official confirmation, that a surveillance camera caught an unidentified person, masked in Polish accounts of the footage, coming through the fence, with the intrusion alarm tripping a few minutes after the fire started. Dobrzynski would not discuss what investigators have, saying only that ABW officers are “working to determine whether this could be considered an act of sabotage”. Polish police say they are looking into the circumstances of the overnight fire at a private company in the town.

The Plant Feeds Drone Programs In Two Countries

WB Group is Poland’s largest privately owned defense company, and its unmanned systems fly on both sides of the Polish-Ukrainian border. The Skarzysko-Kamienna facility builds composite structures and control systems for aerial and ground drones, and Polish Radio identified the affected plant as the one producing drone pumps.

By the group’s own account, its FlyEye reconnaissance aircraft has been in Ukrainian service since 2015 and the Warmate loitering munition since 2017. WB Ukraine, the local subsidiary set up in 2019, moved from repairs and spares to building complete FlyEye systems inside Ukraine in early 2025. Warsaw has leaned harder on that relationship since, and asked Ukrainian designers to help build a Polish drone armada in April. In July, WB Group joined the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance as one of its founding industry members.

So the building that burned sits where Polish manufacturing meets Ukrainian combat experience, and it supplies both.

European Defense Plants Have Been Burning All Year

Counting Skarzysko-Kamienna, at least six European defense manufacturing sites have burned or exploded in 2026, by The Defence Blog’s tally. The run starts in Czechia in March and had reached Estonia by mid-August, with Bulgaria and Italy hit in between.

The Czech case is the one worth reading next to this one. On the night of March 19, masked individuals set fire to the Archer-LPP plant in Pardubice, destroying most of its production capacity along with finished thermal sights meant for Ukrainian soldiers, with damage put at roughly $1.1 million. Czech authorities investigated it as a terrorist act and charged suspects with terrorism, detaining a fifth person by the end of March. An obscure group claimed the attack as a strike on Israeli weapons production, which the company suggested was cover for an operation aimed at its Ukraine work.

Then August. A fire and explosion hit an ammunition store at EMCO in Bulgaria on the 10th, a KNDS ammunition plant in Italy on the 13th, and on the 15th a building used by Milrem Robotics in Tallinn, maker of the THeMIS ground vehicles Ukraine fields. Estonian prosecutors called that one deliberate and premeditated. Three suspects were picked up in Latvia. Two weeks earlier an explosive drone had landed beside a Ukrainian Antonov at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a case where investigators have since found a third drone and a second explosive.

The closest precedent is six days old. On August 25, Slovak police said they had stopped a planned arson attack on a plant in eastern Slovakia belonging to Skyeton, the Ukrainian maker of the Raybird reconnaissance drone. Prosecutors in Presov charged three men, two Latvians and a Ukrainian, with preparing the attack on commission. Two were picked up in Slovakia and the third, a 26-year-old, in Hamburg. Officers seized a gasoline and polystyrene mixture that police compared to napalm, along with a hand-drawn plan of the facility.

Poland has been here before. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in May 2025 that the fire which gutted the Marywilska shopping center in Warsaw a year earlier had been arson ordered by Russian services, coordinated by a handler sitting in Russia.

WB Group Runs An American Arm In Alexandria, Virginia

WB Group America LLC operates out of Alexandria, Virginia as the group’s US strategic arm. Its site says FONET, WB’s digital vehicle communications platform, is in active service with US Armed Forces, and it pitches FlyEye and Warmate to American program offices and allied procurement frameworks.

That is worth holding onto, because the European drone industry is not a foreign curiosity to Washington right now. The CIA’s venture arm put money into Quantum Systems to open a US door for the German manufacturer, and the Pentagon is spending $820 million through the Office of Strategic Capital to stand up a domestic drone parts base the country does not yet have. The plants that already build those parts at scale for a shooting war are in Poland, Czechia and Estonia. This year they keep catching fire.

DroneXL’s Take

Give the Polish services their due. Dobrzynski warned against disinformation before he warned against anything else, and he was right to. A fire in an industrial building at midnight is a fire until an investigator says otherwise, WB Group says the damage was small, and the plant is going back to work. DroneXL spends a lot of column inches telling readers that not every light in the sky is a drone. The same discipline applies to fires. Not every one is Moscow.

The pattern is still the pattern. Six sites in eight months, four of them in August alone, and every case that has produced arrests so far, from Czechia in March to Slovakia last week, has turned up recruited foreign nationals working on commission rather than a lone crank. Whoever is doing this has stopped bothering with the marquee targets and started working the cheap end of the supply chain, the pump shop and the optics bench, where a small fire at midnight buys weeks of delay and costs almost nothing to arrange.

What nobody has said is what the camera actually recorded. Onet’s account is unofficial and the ABW will not discuss it. WB Group’s own statement, as TVP Info quoted it, does not mention an intruder at all. Until that footage is in front of a prosecutor, this is a fire with an alarm log and a rumor attached, and the space between those two things is where the next 48 hours of coverage will live.

On timing, I would not hold my breath for an attribution. Poland took a year to name Russia over Marywilska, and that was a case with people already in custody. Estonia’s August fire already has three suspects detained in Latvia, so it can move fast when the perpetrators are amateurs working on the ground. Which of those two clocks this case runs on will tell you more about the network behind it than any statement out of Warsaw.

There is a harder point here for American readers. US drone policy energy is going into which foreign radios can be sold at retail, an argument DroneXL has covered to exhaustion, while the factories that actually arm NATO’s eastern flank get lit up one warehouse at a time. Only one of those two problems has an arsonist in it.

Sources: Anadolu Agency, Kyiv Independent, Ukrinform, The Defence Blog, TVP Info

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.