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In Poland, compassion for Ukrainians has turned to contempt.
The consequences could be dramatic
Mateusz
Mazzini
Warsaw
failed to anticipate that refugees would build new lives and Kyiv would demand
an equal place at the European table
Wed 26
Aug 2026 05.00 BST
One of
the unintended consequences of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine was that
it gave Poland a rare slice of geopolitical stardom. When Russian tanks started
their ultimately unsuccessful cavalcade towards the Ukrainian capital, ordinary
Poles rushed to help millions of people fleeing the looming conflict. As Polish
people opened their doors to civilians running from Russian bombs, even the
then ruling populist Law and Justice party had to follow suit.
It seemed
that Poland and Ukraine were bound for an iron-clad alliance, unprecedented in
their shared history. Poland advocated for the Ukrainian cause in the west,
with some success. Ukrainian leaders, in turn, praised Poles for their
generosity and the government in Warsaw for contributing weapons and money to
the war effort. Given that recent history between the two countries had been
marked by accusations of second world war-era genocide, border shifts and
postwar displacements of millions of people, it was a remarkable change.
But it
has not lasted. According to a an opinion poll by CBOS, Poland’s largest
polling institution last month, 52% of Poles now oppose their country accepting
Ukrainian refugees. A steadily growing number are becoming weary of supporting
Kyiv, with many rightwingers arguing that weapons transfers have depleted
Poland’s own capacity to defend against a potential Russian incursion.
Memory
politics has unhelpfully reared its head after Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a
military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a branch of which
massacred about 100,000 Poles in 1943. The Polish right responded in kind, and
the president, Karol Nawrocki, revoked Zelenskyy’s Order of the White Eagle,
the highest state honour available to non-Poles. Both sides refused to back
down, returning further honours and pretty much freezing mutual relations.
This is
all great fodder for the Russian propaganda that runs amok on Polish social
media. Misinformation about Ukrainian “welfare queens” claiming benefits at the
expense of hard-working local people is fuelling tensions that, increasingly,
turn to violence. A particularly vicious incident took place on 26 July, when a
young Ukrainian couple was attacked outside a grocery store in Wrocław. The
suspected attackers allegedly shouted, “go away to war”. Headlines trickle out
almost daily about Ukrainian citizens being verbally abused or physically
attacked in Polish streets.
Personal
spats between leaders, historical disputes, Russian influence – these are some
of the many reasons why the honeymoon is over. But another dimension of this
deteriorating relationship keeps being overlooked. In dealing with the urgent
fallout of the conflict, neither country had done enough to understand each
other beyond the war. That failure is now coming back to haunt them.
To put it
bluntly, Poland had failed to fully realise that Ukrainians were not just
helpless victims of Vladimir Putin, but actual people with agency. As soon as
they could, many Ukrainian refugees moved out of their hosts’ living rooms and
rented or bought apartments. They set up businesses, many of which are now
flourishing, and created a robust community, often engaging in direct
competition with local people. They refused to behave as grateful or passive
recipients of Polish charity. This is an understandable, indeed desirable
progression, but as a result, compassion ceased to be the currency of the
relationship between Poles and Ukrainians. For Poland, a country nearly
entirely ethnically homogenous since its postwar years, such a change became
difficult, if not impossible, to handle.
But
Ukraine is of course, a country like any other, with a large economy and
national interests beyond its resistance to Putin’s war of aggression. It has
evolved from passive recipient of western aid in the aftermath of the
full-scale invasion in 2022, to a global exporter of new military technology
and knowhow. Accustomed to direct talks with US and western European leaders,
Ukranians do not need an “advocate”, certainly not in Warsaw. Zelenskyy can run
his own show.
What
emerges, therefore, is contempt in place of cooperation, and hate in place of
hope. The initial enthusiasm was bound eventually to disappear, and both
governments should have prepared for that. Instead, they allowed a vacuum to be
filled by Russian misinformation aimed at pulling the two countries further
apart, thus weakening Europe’s support for Ukraine. Such an outcome could and
should have been avoided, especially by Donald Tusk’s liberal governing
coalition.
It failed
to recognise Ukraine’s growing ambitions and continued to feed the myth that
Warsaw was destined to play a Promethean role in Kyiv’s future. It did not
prepare its own people for accepting refugees as fully fledged members of
society. And it fostered the delusion that it was Poland that, somehow, had a
decisive vote on whether Ukraine enters democratic Europe.
Poland’s
shortsightedness is a cautionary tale. Whatever happens in the next few years,
it seems certain that Ukraine will be drawn closer to Europe, and Ukrainians
closer to the European economies. They will become business competitors to the
French and Germans, just as they have been to the Poles. Ukrainian leaders will
come to Brussels, Paris and Berlin, asking not for free bullets and money, but
for an equal voice, arguing that their defence of the continent against Russian
barbarism has earned them a seat at the table.
None of
this should come as a surprise: Ukrainians are more than victims, and Ukraine
is more than a country at war. Poland’s failure to take this into account has
already had dramatic consequences. The rest of Europe still has time to prepare
for that obvious reality.
Mateusz
Mazzini is a Warsaw-based journalist writing on global affairs for Poland’s
Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka
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