Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski was at the scene early Monday and said a bailiff had entered the two seemingly empty, fenced-in buildings, nicknamed “Spyville” by Warsaw residents, to check on their condition and mark them as the city. Trzaskowski said Warsaw was taking back the complex “illegally” owned by Russia. He said last month that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 had added urgency to the decades-long process. “It is very symbolic that we are closing this process for many years now, at the time of Russia’s attack on Ukraine,” Trzaskowski said on Twitter. Ukrainian Ambassador Andrii Deshchytsia told Poland’s state-run PAP news agency that Ukraine would apply for the lease of the complex, which could be used for a school or a Ukrainian cultural center. One of Trzaskowski’s proposals for the 100 apartments there is to house war refugees from Ukraine. More than 2.6 million of them have passed through Poland since the beginning of the Russian invasion. The Russian Embassy, which built the high-rise buildings in the 1970s on a plot of land acquired by the city, is refusing court orders to pay to rent or hand over the land. When it was busy, the buildings were vacated in the 1990s, after Poland relinquished its communist rule and sovereignty to the Soviet Union in 1989, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Since then, Poland has said that the contract for the lease of the plot had expired and demanded its return. But its gates remained closed and guarded. Russia’s diplomatic and business missions have far more assets in Poland than Poland’s in Russia, which violates reciprocity rules, according to the Polish Foreign Ministry.
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