Warsaw’s Political Fight with Kyiv Is Being Settled on Polish Streets

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. By July, for the first time since this question was asked in polling, 52 per cent of Poles opposed accepting Ukrainian refugees, against 42 per cent who supported it. “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,” Iwanuk 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.