Attacks on Ukrainians rise in Poland as public support for refugees cools
A series of violent incidents against Ukrainians in Poland, including a beating in Wroclaw and an assault on teenagers in Plock, comes as surveys show declining Polish support for hosting refugees. Historical tensions between Warsaw and Kyiv are adding to the strain.
Poland has seen a rise in hostility toward its large Ukrainian community, marked by violent incidents and shifting public opinion. On 26 July in Wroclaw, a Ukrainian woman was called a "Ukrainian rag" after asking a man to respect a queue in a shop; minutes later, he and two others beat her and her boyfriend, sending both to hospital. Two suspects pleaded not guilty in court to charges of ethnically motivated assault, while the city's mayor condemned the attack as hate-driven violence with no place in Wroclaw.
In another case in late June, a stranger on a bus in Plock told two Ukrainian teenagers to stop speaking Ukrainian and "speak Polish in Poland," then shouted at them to leave the country and physically confronted one of the boys before forcing them off the bus. Police initially declined to treat the incident as a hate crime until the mother filed a formal complaint.
Cooling public support
Since Russia's full-scale invasion began in 2022, Poland has hosted more Ukrainian refugees than any European country besides Germany — nearly a million held refugee status as of April, with roughly another million working as labour migrants. Both incidents come amid Polish police reports of a sharp rise in hate crimes against Ukrainians over the past six months.
Public opinion has also shifted: a recent survey found a majority of Poles now oppose accepting more Ukrainian refugees, a steep drop from the near-universal support recorded shortly after the invasion began. Many Poles also favour limiting free healthcare access for Ukrainians.
Analysts point to several contributing factors, including rising living costs, a perception that state support for Ukrainians is too generous, and renewed public debate over a decades-old historical dispute — the mass killing of Poles in Volhynia during World War Two, which Poland considers genocide but Ukraine disputes. A recent controversy over Ukraine's honouring of a wartime military unit further strained relations between the countries' leaderships, with commentators warning that online hostility toward Ukrainian speakers is increasingly spilling into real-life confrontations.
