WARSAW — Poland has ordered two thousand volunteers to walk the entire length of its border with Germany, inspecting every Starlink dish by hand, after a fire at a satellite station in central Poland was blamed on Russian sabotage.
The volunteers, organized into parish-level brigades, will carry ladders, flashlights and printed photographs of what a normal dish looks like. Each brigade must physically touch every antenna and report back by shouting across the nearest field. The first brigade left on Monday morning from a village near Poznań and is expected to reach the German border by Thursday, weather permitting.
«We are not waiting for paperwork,» said a Polish interior ministry official. «We are walking. If a dish is warm, we mark it with chalk. If it is cold, we mark it with different chalk.»
In Berlin, two Turkish citizens were arrested and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk demanded they be handed over immediately, preferably on a handcart pushed by German police across the bridge at Frankfurt an der Oder. German authorities have agreed to push the handcart but insist on using their own wheels.
The volunteers have already discovered three dishes that were slightly dusty and one that was pointing at a tree. A second wave of five thousand walkers is being recruited to inspect the dishes from the other side, in case the first wave missed a warm one.