A quarrel over wartime memory and an election campaign that made Ukrainian refugees a political issue have left Poland’s largest immigrant community more exposed than at any time since 2022.
The night before National Independence Day began as an ordinary shift for Marharyta Nauman, a Ukrainian taxi driver living in Leszno, a town in western Poland. But a famous rapper was playing a club in the centre, and there were more teenagers out than Nauman, who is 49, had ever seen in the years she had lived there.
At around 03:00, a fare came in from the club. A fight was going on outside and two boys were being pulled apart. A cousin of one of them had ordered the taxi and paid for it; he put the boy in the back and told Nauman to drive him straight home.
“I made my way through crowds of young people, driving very slowly,” Nauman tells BIRN. “I was afraid he would jump out.”
Past the roundabout, the boy – who later turned out to be 16 and cannot be named for legal reasons – realised nobody was taking him back to the club and demanded a petrol station on the far edge of town. She kept to the address on the booking. As she slowed to turn, he wrenched at the wheel; they nearly hit an oncoming car.
Outside the house he refused to get out. Nauman called her boss and left the phone in her pocket, so he heard what happened next: the boy climbed into the driver’s seat, shouting “If you won’t drive me, Ukrainian whore, I’ll drive myself”, followed by Nauman reaching in to turn off the engine and take the key.
Then he came after her. Nauman is 156 centimetres tall and weighs 55 kilograms. A blow to the knee put her on the ground. He kicked her while she was down and at one point filmed it. She reached the door of the house and rang the bell. He caught up and drove his knees into her, crushing her against the door, until it opened and she fell inside at a man’s feet. They belonged to the boy’s father.
She had been hit so hard in the chest that she could not speak. When she got her breath back, she started screaming.
“The boy’s mother pulled at me and told me to stop,” she recalled. “I crawled out on all fours. She closed the door behind me.”
The entire episode, from the moment Nauman picked him up outside the club, lasted about an hour. Eventually, her boss arrived with a passenger who happened to be an off-duty police officer. The officer gave her first aid when she started vomiting and called an ambulance.
Medical records reviewed by BIRN documented injuries to her chest and lower leg, multiple bruises and a possible fractured rib. A CT scan the following day described “multi-organ trauma”.
“I’m almost 50. I’ve never insulted or attacked anyone. No one had ever beaten me up in my life,” Marharyta tells BIRN nine months after the attack. “But it turns out that you can do nothing wrong and still encounter this kind of aggression. Where does it come from?”
Slight trace of an accent
The goodwill that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had been eroding for years before Nauman started her shift that night. In the spring of 2022, almost every Pole surveyed supported taking in people fleeing the war. By December 2025, however, the country was close to being evenly split: 48 per cent still in favour, 46 per cent against.
Recent National Police data shared with BIRN suggests that this worsening mood is increasingly spilling over into criminal behaviour. Police recorded 267 Ukrainian citizens as victims in hate-crime proceedings in 2024 and 275 in 2025, while hate crime overall increased by about a third. The police changed the way such offences are recorded in 2026, making direct comparisons difficult. But the new system alone does not explain this year’s figures: by August 26, police had already recorded 356 offences linked to hatred of Ukrainians, and almost nine in ten fell under laws that were counted under the old system too. They included 204 cases of public insult or violation of bodily integrity motivated by prejudice, and 71 involving violence or unlawful threats.
Dr Lukasz Adamski, director of Warsaw’s Mieroszewski Centre for Dialogue and an expert in Polish-Ukrainian relations, is wary of describing the trend as Polish society simply turning against Ukrainians. He suspects something narrower, and in some ways more dangerous.
“I’m more inclined to think that people who were already xenophobic or resentful are becoming more radical, fuelled by anger over Ukraine’s memory politics, war fatigue and everyday tensions with Ukrainians,” he tells BIRN.
Recent CBOS polling bears out that distinction. Acceptance remains high in everyday life: 83 per cent of Poles say they would accept a Ukrainian as a colleague, 82 per cent as a neighbour and 75 per cent as a doctor. But those shares have fallen across every relationship measured since 2023.
For Nauman’s daughter Elvira, 25, the shift is perceptible in small encounters.
“Even ordinary situations feel different now. You brush against someone in a shop, say sorry, and suddenly there’s this hostility,” she says. “People react to the slightest trace of a Ukrainian accent. We try not to speak Ukrainian in the street anymore, but it wasn’t like this three years ago.”
Dr Oleksandra Iwaniuk knows that instinct. She grew up in Kyiv before moving to Poland to study in 2010, and now teaches political science at the University of Warsaw. A writer as well as an academic, she founded the Po Sasiedzku (Next Door) Literary Club, which uses literature to foster dialogue between Poles and their eastern neighbours. She rarely speaks Ukrainian in public, but one afternoon in July 2025, she was travelling by tram towards central Warsaw and talking to a friend in Ukrainian when a man in military-style clothing turned on them, shouting abuse and calling them “Russian whores”. Nobody else in the tram intervened.
When she wrote about the incident online, hundreds of people responded with versions of the same message: “Me too”. “It felt like a moment when something that had been happening quietly suddenly became visible,” she says.
She reported the assault, and her experience with the police felt therapeutic – she was met with empathy and care. But she believes many incidents go unreported, particularly since deportation has entered the political discourse.
In August, the opposition Law and Justice party (PiS) proposed that Ukrainian men aged 25 to 60 who lack legal employment in Poland, including those working illegally, be deported if the party returns to power after next year’s parliamentary election. It also proposed dedicated deportation centres.
“With deportation now part of the political debate, people may be even more afraid to report attacks,” Iwaniuk says. “If someone beats you up and then threatens to tell the police that you were the aggressor and could be deported, that can be enough to keep you silent.”
Going public
The first contact with the authorities left the Naumans feeling uneasy. The evening after the assault a policewoman came to ask whether Marharyta intended to report it. When she replied yes, the officer appeared surprised and did not have the necessary paperwork with her.
Unable to contain her anger over the attack, Marharyta’s daughter Elvira went public on Facebook.
“Imagine a night,” the post began. “Imagine a boy knocking a woman to the ground with a single blow to the knee.” She described the assault, ending with the 16-year-old’s words to her mother: “Fucking whore, fuck off back to Ukraine.”
After the post went viral, the administrative response gained momentum. Police reviewed surveillance footage and took a detailed statement from Nauman. The mayor of Leszno contacted the family. The boy was placed under the supervision of a probation officer, and on November 14, 2025, a juvenile court in Leszno opened proceedings against him. Court documents reviewed by BIRN say the case concerns bodily injury, an offence connected to Marharyta’s nationality and threats to kill her. The first hearing in the case is scheduled for September 15.
Around 50 strangers wrote privately to Elvira to apologise. Some asked for the boy’s address so they could “take care of him”. But Marharyta wanted none of that. “I thought: he didn’t kill me, so now you will kill him? What is the point of that?”
Among the well-meaning messages, however, was also a six-second video of a pig’s head on a board with a knife beside it. “Every Ukrainian pig should be removed from the country by any means available,” the accompanying message said.
Then somebody came to their building and beat on the locked street door while shouting anti-Ukrainian slurs. The family moved house.
Anti-Ukrainian card
In June, Polish-Ukrainian relations made international headlines after President Volodymyr Zelensky was stripped of Poland’s highest order, and returned it by post. But the hostility did not begin with a single political dispute.
Last year, BIRN documented how during Poland’s presidential race candidates across the political spectrum reached for the “anti-Ukrainian card”, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in public.
“The campaign was the real turning point, because that was when Ukrainians living in Poland – and, more broadly, Ukraine and support for it – became a domestic political issue,” says Iwaniuk.
It was much easier to blame “failing public services” on Ukrainian ‘privileges’ than to fix the system itself, she says: “Populists need an enemy, and after other groups, including the LGBTQ community, it became the Ukrainians’ turn – because there were enough of them to turn resentment into political capital.”
Ideas that had once largely been confined to the political right moved into the mainstream. After taking office, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed an extension of the Ukrainian assistance law, arguing that the 800+ child benefit should be reserved for Ukrainians working in Poland. Revised legislation tied access to some benefits more closely to employment and school attendance. In March, Poland also began winding down much of the exceptional system created after the invasion.
For Bartlomiej Pejo, an MP from the right-wing Confederation party, measures limiting exceptional treatment are not evidence of hostility but a correction to policies he believes privileged Ukrainians over other foreigners. “The Polish state should treat all foreigners equally, without granting special privileges,” he tells BIRN.
Pejo condemns attacks against Ukrainians but rejects the idea that Poland is experiencing an extraordinary wave of hostility. He argues that crimes by Ukrainian citizens against Poles receive less attention, and that Polish anger over Ukrainian attitudes to the massacres committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, during World War II is too readily dismissed as prejudice.
That historical dispute has become impossible to separate from the deterioration in relations.
The latest escalation began in May, when President Zelensky granted a Ukrainian military unit the honorary title of “Heroes of the UPA”. The UPA tis celebrated by many Ukrainians for fighting for Ukrainian independence during World War II, but its members were also responsible for wartime massacres of tens of thousands of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Responding to Zelensky’s decision, President Nawrocki stripped him of Poland’s highest state decoration in June, which Zelensky famously returned by courier.
“In Poland, the feeling was roughly: ‘We helped them so much, we opened our homes to them, and in return they honour people responsible for the genocide of Poles’,” Dr Adamski explains. “In Ukraine, it was: ‘For four and a half years we’ve been fighting, suffering and, in doing so, defending Poland too from Russian aggression – and now they’re trying to tell us who we can and cannot regard as our national heroes.’
Russia has inevitably sought to amplify those tensions. An analysis by the Polish Institute of International Affairs found that between May 26 and July 13 the number of Polish-language social-media posts containing extreme anti-Ukrainian hate speech rose by 171 per cent, while engagement with them increased by 345 per cent. Russian fingerprints were visible throughout the surge: VKontakte (VK), Russia’s largest social network, was the most prominent forum, while coordinated pro-Kremlin networks such as Operation Pravda also featured prominently. The institute concluded that, while Moscow did not create the crisis, Russia has become its main beneficiary.
The deeper problem, Adamski argues, is cumulative. Older prejudices met Russian disinformation, social media and a coarsening political debate, while journalists and intellectuals lost some of their traditional role as gatekeepers. Resentments that might once have been moderated increasingly reach voters directly – and can be rewarded politically.
But carelessness has not been one-sided.
History itself is understood very differently in the two societies. Growing up in Kyiv, Iwaniuk says she was barely taught about Volhynia: “Poles are immersed in history. They talk about history in magazines, on television, at the dinner table.” In Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, by contrast, people were taught not to ask too many questions about the past. She remembers asking her father about the UPA and Volhynia when she was still a schoolgirl. He answered: “I don’t know – I think they were the ones who fought against everyone.”
That gap, she argues, helped produce remarkably hapless political gestures. For example, the former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko knelt at a memorial to Polish victims of Volhynia a day after Kyiv renamed Moscow Avenue after UPA leader Stepan Bandera; Ukraine’s parliament recognised UPA members as independence fighters on the same day that former Polish president Bronislaw Komorowski was visiting Kyiv.
“President Zelensky certainly knew that Poland had a different view of the UPA than Ukraine, but I doubt the decision to name one of the units after the ‘Heroes of the UPA’ was meant as a deliberate provocation,” Adamski says. “My impression is that no one in Kyiv fully anticipated the fallout.”
There is also an economic asymmetry.
“Poland’s post-Communist transformation succeeded, while Ukraine is still fighting for survival as a state,” Iwaniuk argues. “While Poles have the luxury of looking back and debating the past, for Ukrainians the reaction is often: ‘Are you kidding? You want to talk about this now, when we don’t even know if our country will exist?’”
That does not make anti-Ukrainian violence an inevitable or legitimate consequence. But it helps explain how a relationship built on extraordinary solidarity became politically combustible.
The distinction is visible in another paradox that Iwaniuk points to: Ukrainians are becoming more integrated into Polish society just as the imagined collective “Ukrainian” is becoming more threatening in political discourse.
“They are your neighbour, the father of your child’s classmate, a colleague, the woman working in the local shop, someone running a business down the street,” she says. Yet the abstract Ukrainian is increasingly portrayed as a criminal, competitor or security threat.
Vladimir Medvedev, a Belarusian-born Polish citizen who founded the Glos Migranta (The Migrant’s Voice) initiative this summer, encountered another consequence when organising a recent migrants’ rights demonstration: people with legal status worried about far-right activists, provocations and deportation. Even a German acquaintance of his, married to a Polish woman and fluent in Polish, had been told to “fuck off to Ukraine” after somebody heard his accent.
Both governments now appear to understand the danger. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has publicly urged Warsaw and Kyiv to de-escalate, and recent bilateral talks have stressed the importance of “responsible communication” and a balanced tone in public debate.
On August 24, Warsaw hosted an event marking the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence at Castle Square, where blue and yellow flags flew next to the white and red ones.
But the political temperature does not fall on command. On August 14, a 14-year-old Ukrainian girl and her 12-year-old brother were allegedly abused and physically attacked near the railway station in Bydgoszcz after speaking Ukrainian. A woman was later charged with insulting them and violating their bodily integrity because of their nationality. She has denied the allegations.
What it cost
For the Naumans, the damage is already intimate. They initially tried to hide news of the assault from Marharyta’s father in Ukraine, but once the case appeared in the national media, they told him themselves. That night, he suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma. He died six days after his daughter was assaulted. Marharyta was still largely bedridden and could not travel to say goodbye. It was another heavy blow, after her husband died in 2022 just months after joining the Ukrainian army.
Then her employer stopped answering the phone. Her wages stopped too, and she discovered that social-insurance contributions deducted from her salary had not been passed on to the state. The assault had never been registered as an accident at work. Luckily, the staff at the local social insurance office was sympathetic, and helped her navigate the case. She has also been offered free psychological and psychiatric help.
Marharyta came to Leszno almost by accident. She arrived in Poland for work in 2020, and the agency she was with assigned her there. She grew to love the town, and six years later she says she would not want to live anywhere else. But she no longer moves through it in the same way. “For months after the assault, I hardly left the flat,” she tells BIRN.
Medication has helped. Familiar destinations are easiest: the vet, the social insurance office, places where she knows the people. Crowded shops and unfamiliar streets remain difficult. “When I see a group of young people,” she says, “I don’t feel safe.”
Her daughter Elvira says that the response from people in Leszno gave her some hope and faith that things could get better. But often when she closes her eyes, she still sees her mother on the ground at three in the morning, a 16-year-old kicking her while she screams.
Source: balkaninsight.com
