Eleven of seventeen antennas at a Starlink ground station near Sofia, Bulgaria were deliberately set on fire on October 9, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev confirmed on Wednesday. Two men aged 20 and 21, both holding German passports and described as having migrant backgrounds, were detained in Bulgaria on Monday. Investigators are now examining whether the pair belongs to a wider sabotage network. The Sofia attack mirrors a nearly identical incident three weeks earlier: a Starlink ground terminal south of Warsaw was set ablaze on September 23. Two suspected saboteurs in that case were arrested on Tuesday in Nürtingen, near Stuttgart. Bulgarian investigators are actively probing links between the four suspects across both countries, according to the news outlet Faktor.bg. The targets are not random. Starlink ground stations relay satellite internet to Ukrainian forces, making them strategically essential infrastructure in the war against Russia's invasion. Pro-Western Bulgarian opposition party Democratic Bulgaria explicitly accused Russia of being linked to the Sofia attack. The Polish government suspects Russian intelligence services orchestrated the Warsaw incident. The pattern — multiple countries, coordinated timing, young operatives with German travel documents entering via third-country borders — fits the profile of a state-directed sabotage campaign rather than freelance activism. The two Bulgarian suspects entered legally from Greece through the Kulata border crossing, suggesting deliberate route planning to avoid direct surveillance corridors. Bulgarian Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev told parliament that additional security measures had been introduced at similar facilities, while conceding that responsibility for protecting these privately owned sites rests with their owners. This is the structural vulnerability: strategically critical military-support infrastructure sitting behind private-sector security budgets. Plamen Tonchev, head of Bulgaria's State Agency for National Security (DANS), stated plainly that the fire was an act of sabotage and warned that similar attacks "cannot be ruled out in the future." The pro-Western opposition alliance Democratic Bulgaria had initially disclosed the attack, pushing it into public view before the government confirmed details. The investigation now pivots on whether the four suspects across two countries constitute a discoverable network or the visible edge of something larger. German, Bulgarian, and Polish intelligence services are operating on overlapping threads, with Germany emerging as both the passport origin and the arrest jurisdiction for suspects in both attacks.
