Are Polish attitudes to Ukrainian refugees souring?

Lukasz Jakubowski regularly visits schools where Polish children insult and even physically attack their Ukrainian classmates. Unfortunately, he says, such incidents are on the rise.

Jakubowski works as an anti-discrimination coach for the Polish association Never Again (Nigdy wiecej) in the Polish capital, Warsaw.

"In one school that I visit, there are children from Ukraine who are learning Polish and naturally still have difficulty speaking the language," Jakubowski tells DW. "Some of the other children don't want to play with them. They push them away and insult them, putting up a kind of psychological barrier. They tell them they should go back to Ukraine."

The association has been publishing reports detailing racist attacks such as these since 2009. It calls these reports its "brown books."

Attacks and hate speech on the up

Just under 1 million people have fled to Poland from Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion of that country in February 2022.

Lukasz Jakubowski works as an anti-discrimination coach for the association Never Again (Nigdy wiecej) in WarsawImage: Privat

The number of attacks on this group of people has increased drastically over the past three years, says Jakubowski. Internet hate speech targeting Ukrainians is also on the rise.

People accuse the Polish government of being too generous to its war-torn southeastern neighbor. There have even been calls to "resist" an alleged "Ukrainian storm" on local government authorities in Poland.

A journalist and writer who is popular in the right-wing scene has claimed that Ukraine is a morally degenerate country with which Poland should not do business.

In March 2024, a swastika was daubed on the front of the headquarters of The Ukrainian House foundation in Warsaw. According to foundation head Miroslawa Keryk, this act of vandalism is linked to the "growing anti-Ukrainian attitudes" in Poland, which intensified during the grain dispute with Ukraine.

Protests against Ukrainian grain imports and transport companies

In both 2023 and 2024, there were massive protests across Poland against the opening up of the EU market for Ukrainian grain. All manner of negative and offensive things were said about Ukrainians during these demonstrations.

Many Polish farmers took part in demonstrations last year to protest the influx of cheap agricultural products from Ukraine (pictured here: a protest in Warsaw in February 2024)Image: Czarek Sokolowski/dpa/AP/picture alliance

The situation was similar during the 2023 truck drivers' protests against the opening of the EU market to Ukrainian transportation companies. These protests were backed by the far-right Confederation party.

Never Again has also documented hundreds of cases of Ukrainians being beaten up or otherwise physically abused.

"In some cases, it is enough for people to hear an eastern European language being spoken on the street — regardless of whether it is Russian or Ukrainian — to launch an attack," says Jakubowski, who goes on to say that many Poles cannot tell the difference between the two languages. "This means that even people who have lived in Poland for years now face resentment," he said.

From a warm welcome to cold, hard reality

A survey conducted last November and December by the Warsaw-based think tank Mieroszewski Centreshows that sympathy for Ukrainians is plummeting in Poland.

Only 25% of respondents expressed a positive opinion about Ukrainian refugees, 30% a negative opinion and 41% a neutral opinion.

Half of those surveyed said that the support given to refugees was too high. Only 5% said it was insufficient.

Many in Poland feel that Ukrainian refugees' expectations regarding welfare benefits and wages are too high. Another widely held opinion is that they "behave as if they own the place," are loud and dishonest.

But the Mieroszewski Centre's surveys show the other side of the coin, too: Ukrainian attitudes towards their northwestern neighbors are also deteriorating. In 2022, 83% of Ukrainian respondents said they had a positive opinion of Poles; in November 2024, this had slumped to only 41%.

The 'demythologization' of Ukrainians

At the same time, the number of people with a neutral attitude is on the rise, which the researchers interpret as being "an indication of an increasingly pragmatic nature of the relationship."

Ukrainian children at a school in WarsawImage: Michal Dyjuk/AP/picture alliance

They refer to this as the "demythologization" of Ukrainians in the eyes of the Poles. Although Poles respect the Ukrainians' "heroic attitude" in the face of Russian aggression, and the majority of Poles supports Ukraine's efforts to join NATO and the EU, day-to-day problems are increasingly coming to the fore.

Ukrainians on the labor market are hard-working and enterprising, which means that many Poles fear the competition.

"Others see the huge importance of Ukrainians for the Polish economy. Many companies fear that we would have massive problems were several hundred thousand Ukrainians to leave the country all of a sudden," says Ernest Wyciszkiewicz, director of the Mieroszewski Centre.

'Real life' experiences very different

As co-founder of the StandWithUkraine foundation and the Euromaidan Warsaw initiative, activist Natalia Panchenko is one of the best-known faces of the Ukrainian diaspora in Poland, which is why she is often the target of hatred and abuse.

Activist Natalia Panchenko is one of the best-known Ukrainians in PolandImage: Marek Antoni Iwanczuk/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/picture alliance

"Attacks against me generally come from anonymous people on the internet who have never met me but dump all of their resentment towards Ukrainians on me," she tells DW.

However, she says there is a gulf between the survey results and day-to-day experiences: "In real life, most Poles who encounter us at work, in preschools or at school, have nothing against us," she says.

She emphasizes that most Ukrainians in Poland integrate well into society, learn Polish quickly and rarely hear an unkind word from Poles.

Ukrainians now an election issue

Some politicians are obviously hoping to use anti-Ukrainian sentiment to bolster their support in the runup to the presidential election in May.

According to Ernest Wyciszkiewicz, many companies fear Poland would have massive problems if Ukrainians were suddenly to leave the country in large numbersImage: Yuri Drug

Both Rafal Trzaskowski, mayor of Warsaw and the liberal candidate supported by the coalition party Civic Platform (PO), and Karol Nawrocki, who has the backing of the opposition national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, would like child benefits to be paid only to those Ukrainian parents who work and pay taxes in Poland.

Monthly child benefit payments in Poland amount to about €200 ($217) per child. Currently, all parents in Poland receive this benefit.

There are at present about 900,000 Ukrainian refugees in Poland. The vast majority of the adults in this group are in work. For most of them, the child benefit payments are absolutely vital because Ukrainian refugees in Poland receive no other welfare payments from the state.

Natalia Panchenko considers the current discussion about restricting access to child benefit payments to be discriminating because it would only affect Ukrainians and not any other group of migrants.

Nevertheless, the measure could soon be put in place because it is one of the only things almost all parties in Poland currently agree on.

This article was originally published in German.