Nastya Podorozhnya, 29, had a bad feeling in the first days of the war. Poland’s volunteers were meeting refugees at train stations with open arms, but she also saw danger. Women taking help from strangers could become easy prey for traffickers. That was why she started Martynka, a helpline and support network for Ukrainian women refugees who need to get away from abusers.
Four years on, the shift is hard to miss. Money for refugee aid is drying up, Ukrainians meet more hostility, and Poland has no integration strategy for the long run. War fatigue is deepening, and politicians increasingly exploit the mood against refugees for their own advantage, the AP reported from Krakow in July 2026.
A shelter running on fumes
Martynka’s shelter is an unmarked two-bedroom flat in the middle of Krakow; over 100 women and children have stayed there. Staff help residents leave abusers and arrange doctors, counselling, work and a place to live. Money was easy to raise in the first months, Podorozhnya says; international donors have since turned to other crises. When she and her colleagues appeal for donations, the replies often include a torrent of online abuse.
The welcome had been enormous. The United Nations counts around 3.5 million Ukrainians crossing into Poland during the war’s opening weeks. Poles greeted them at stations, opened their homes, and the government let refugees work and claim welfare payments.
Anger in the classroom
The mood has soured. Lukasz Jakubowski, an anti-discrimination coach with the Warsaw association Never Again, goes into schools where Polish pupils abuse, and sometimes hit, their Ukrainian classmates. “They push them away and insult them, putting up a kind of psychological barrier,” he told DW. “They tell them they should go back to Ukraine.” The association has published reports on racist attacks since 2009 and says attacks on Ukrainians have risen sharply over three years, along with hate speech online.
Political flashpoints fed it. Massive protests across Poland in 2023 and 2024 objected to Ukrainian grain entering the EU market, and truck drivers protested in 2023 against Ukrainian transport firms, with the far-right Confederation party backing them. In March 2024 someone daubed a swastika on the Warsaw offices of the foundation The Ukrainian House. Its head, Miroslawa Keryk, linked it to “growing anti-Ukrainian attitudes”.
Poland has taken in just under 1 million people from Ukraine since the invasion, and polling points the same way. A survey by the Warsaw think tank Mieroszewski Centre, taken in November and December, found only 25% of respondents had a positive opinion of Ukrainian refugees, 30% a negative one and 41% a neutral one. Half said support for refugees was too high. Just 5% called it insufficient.
Jakubowski adds a grim detail: hearing any eastern European language on the street can be enough to provoke an attack, because many Poles cannot tell Russian from Ukrainian. Long-term residents are not spared the resentment either.
Sources
- https://www.dw.com/en/are-polish-attitudes-to-ukrainian-refugees-souring/a-71921543
- A women's shelter for refugees in Poland fights for survival as anti-Ukrainian sentiment rises
