Prosecutors in Poland have charged an 18-year-old Ukrainian man with carrying out sabotage acts on behalf of Russian intelligence aimed at inciting tensions between Poland and Ukraine.

The suspect, identified as Illia K, under Polish privacy laws, was charged with 47 criminal acts between November 2024 and August 2025, when he was arrested.

The alleged sabotage included desecrating memorials to Polish victims of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army that took part in the murder of tens of thousands of Poles during the Second World War known as the Volyhnia massacre.

"The aim was to incite ethnic tensions between Poland and Ukraine," Poland's Internal Security Agency (ABW) said in a statement.

Prosecutors said that although the suspect himself had acted for financial rather than ideological reasons most of the alleged acts were "for the benefit of foreign intelligence".

The ABW said in May that it had launched 48 espionage investigations last year, more than double the number in 2024. Russia's secret services had focused on discrediting Poland internationally and exploiting "historical ethnic antagonisms, mainly in Polish-Ukrainian relations", it said.

The 18-year-old was also charged with making preparations to fly a drone over Polish president Karol Nawrocki's vehicle during last year's Polish Armed Forces' Day parade in Warsaw on August 15. He was arrested three days before the event took place.

The suspect, who faces life in prison if found guilty, allegedly recruited people to take part in the crimes, using cryptocurrencies registered in Russia and China to pay them, the ABW said.

According to prosecutors, Illia K was given tasks by an unidentified person via a messaging service. He sent photos back proving he had carried out the tasks.

He allegedly vandalised the Monument to the Jewish Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto in the Polish capital and monuments to the Polish victims of the Volyhnia massacre in Domostawa and Wrocław, by placing inscriptions and symbols that glorified the UPA.

Up to one hundred thousand of the minority Polish population of what was then Poland and is now western Ukraine were killed during the Volyhnia massacre in 1943 and 1944 as the UPA fought to create an independent Ukraine for Ukrainians.

The painful issue has bedevilled relations between the neighbours ever since. At times Kyiv banned Polish requests to exhume the victims' remains from mass graves, although exhumations have resumed.

The massacre was resurrected in May when Zelensky issued a decree naming a Ukrainian military unit after the "Heroes of the UPA".

In response, Nawrocki stripped the Ukrainian leaderof Poland's highest state honour - the Order of the White Eagle - something that had happened only once before in 300 years.

Poles and Ukrainians view the UPA very differently, said Wojciech Konończuk, director of Warsaw's Office for Eastern Studies.

"For Ukrainians they are heroes because they fought the Soviets," he told the BBC in a recent interview. "Many years after the Second World War, the UPA were fighting the Soviet occupation, so Ukrainians only want to remember that part of the history of the formation after 1945. So they don't know, or don't want to know what were the UPA activities before 1945."

"For Poles, the UPA were a criminal structure which was responsible for the mass killing of the Polish population. At the same time the level of knowledge in Poland of the history of UPA after the Second World War - basically they were fighters against the Soviets - is usually non-existing knowledge in Polish society," he added.