In Poland, the atmosphere for Ukrainians is deteriorating after the peak of support demonstrated by Poles at the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion. As The Guardian writes, the negative perception of Ukrainians is being amplified by political debates that have shifted to the re-emergence of historical grievances, UNN reports.
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As the publication writes, Valeriia Kholkina was buying ice cream with her husband and four-year-old daughter when a man heard them speaking Ukrainian. "Teach your daughter to speak Polish," the stranger said. He then physically assaulted both parents.
The incident, which occurred in the city of Szczecin in northwestern Poland, reflects an increasingly hostile atmosphere for Ukrainians in the country, a sharp turn compared to the sentiment in 2022. Then, after Russia's full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Poles showed support and hospitality to their neighbors, volunteering at the border and offering their homes to refugees.
Now, this outpouring of goodwill is drying up as the war approaches its fourth anniversary, and polls show an increasingly negative perception of Ukrainians in Poland, fueled by political debates that have shifted to the re-emergence of historical grievances.
According to UNHCR statistics for September, about one million Ukrainian refugees live in Poland. Kholkina is not one of them; she is one of nearly half a million Ukrainians in the country who arrived before 2022 and has lived in Poland for over ten years. "Now I am more Polish than Ukrainian... but I never thought anyone would lecture me on how to talk to my own family," she said. After the attack, she has panic attacks and told her daughter never to speak Ukrainian in public.
Her experience was extreme – and the attacker was sentenced to 14 months in prison – but the experience of abuse for speaking Ukrainian in public has become common.
"The situation is more tense now," said Aliona, a 39-year-old entrepreneur living in a small town in western Poland. "Now, when we go out, the children whisper, 'Mom, let's speak Polish now.' It wasn't like that before. No one commented. Even if they heard my accent, they just smiled," she said.
The publication notes that it is difficult to quantify the scale of verbal and physical attacks on Ukrainians, given that many are unlikely to report incidents to the police. But polls of Poles show that the change in atmosphere is not just anecdotal. One poll shows that support for accepting Ukrainian refugees has fallen from 94% shortly after the invasion to 48% today. Another poll shows that Polish support for Ukraine's EU membership has dropped to 35% from 85% in 2022.
"There is a perception in society that we no longer owe anything to Ukrainians," said Piotr Buras of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw.
Many factors have combined to cause this shift in sentiment. Resentment has been fueled by disinformation and viral videos online. Moreover, the election of right-wing populist Karol Nawrocki as president in June 2025 followed a fierce campaign. Ukrainians are increasingly portrayed as ungrateful and benefit-seeking, despite economic data showing they are net contributors to the Polish economy, the publication adds.
Similar shifts have occurred in other European countries. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the increasing number of young Ukrainian men traveling to Germany. "I asked the Ukrainian president to ensure that young men, especially from Ukraine, do not come to Germany in large numbers – in increasing numbers – but serve their country," he said. His government is working on a bill that will tighten access to aid for Ukrainian refugees.
In Poland, Nawrocki vetoed a government bill in August that would have expanded financial support for Ukrainian refugees, and instead proposed his own legislation that would depend on employment. Ultimately, a compromise bill was passed.
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Oleksandr Pestrikov from the Ukrainian House in Warsaw said that anti-Ukrainian sentiment first appeared online in 2023, and any news about Ukraine in Polish media was immediately flooded with negative comments. Some accused Russian bots of fueling online prejudice, and for a while, online hatred did not seem to penetrate the real world. He said that is now changing.
"Until the summer of this year, this negativity rarely left the internet; the complaints we received from Ukrainians were sporadic and similar to the situation before the full-scale war. But starting from the summer, we have a fairly large number of people reporting attacks on us, fortunately, mostly verbal attacks so far," he said.