Since this summer, we have received a large number of reports of actual attacks. The complex history between Poland and Ukraine plays an important role in fueling these tensions, as the memory of the killing of about 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 by Ukrainian extremist nationalists remains present in the collective memory, in the context of the struggle for the Volyn region. Although Ukraine has finally allowed Poland to exhume the remains of the victims, the pace of work is slow, and the issue is highly sensitive for large sections of Polish society. Nevertheless, not all Ukrainians living in Poland have negative experiences. A survey published at the end of last year showed that 58% of them expect their children to live in Poland for 'many years'. The feeling of discrimination is not universal, especially among residents of major cities, where levels of acceptance and coexistence remain higher compared to other regions.
This incident, which took place in the city of Szczecin in northwestern Poland, reflects a growing climate of hostility towards Ukrainian refugees—a sharp contrast to the situation in 2022, at the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when hundreds of thousands of Poles expressed solidarity with their neighbors, opened their homes to refugees, and volunteered at the borders. However, the wave of empathy has begun to gradually wane as the war approaches its fourth year. Opinion polls indicate a growing negative perception of Ukrainians within Polish society, fueled by political debates shifting to the right, especially those related to immigration, as well as the return of historical disputes and grievances.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about one million Ukrainian refugees live in Poland, but Valeriia Khalkina is not among them. She is one of about half a million Ukrainians who entered Poland before 2022 and had resided there for nearly a decade.
«I now feel more Polish than Ukrainian, and I never imagined that someone would come and dictate to me how to speak with my family,» says Khalkina. Since the attack on her family, she has been suffering from panic attacks and asked her daughter to refrain from speaking Ukrainian in public.
Despite the severity of Khalkina's experience, which ended with the attacker being arrested and sentenced to 14 months in prison, verbal abuse for speaking Ukrainian in public has become a widespread phenomenon.
«I feel the atmosphere has become more tense now,» says Aliona, a 39-year-old Ukrainian woman living in a small town in western Poland. «When we go out, the children whisper: let's speak Polish now. It wasn't like that before, and no one paid attention to us. People would even smile when they heard my accent».
It is difficult to determine the true scale of verbal and physical attacks against Ukrainians, as many do not file official police reports. However, opinion polls clearly reflect that this shift in public sentiment is not just a series of isolated cases. One poll showed that support for receiving Ukrainian refugees dropped from 94% immediately after the outbreak of the war to 48% currently. Another poll showed that support for Ukraine's accession to the European Union fell to 35%, after being 85% in 2022.
This shift in sentiment is due to a number of interrelated factors, including the widespread spread of misinformation and videos online that have fueled resentment. Additionally, the election of populist politician Karol Nawrocki as president of the country in June 2025 has pushed the entire Polish political scene to the right. During this period, Ukrainians were repeatedly portrayed as ungrateful and overly dependent on aid, despite economic data indicating their positive net contribution to the Polish economy.
Nawrocki used his veto power on a government bill in August that aimed to expand financial assistance to Ukrainian refugees, and instead proposed legislation that would link the receipt of aid to the requirement to work. Ultimately, a compromise bill was reached.
«Anti-Ukrainian sentiment began to appear online back in 2023,» says Oleksandr Bystriukov from the Warsaw House Institute. «Every news item related to Kyiv in the Polish media was met with a stream of negative comments». He accused some Russian entities of fueling this electronic bigotry.
«For a while, it seemed that this hatred was confined to the digital space, but this summer it began to spill over into the real world,» Bystriukov added. «Rarely did this negativity go beyond the internet, and the complaints we received from Ukrainians were limited and similar to those before the all-out war».