04. ledna, 2026 Olena Babakova
In late February 2022, as the world watched Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s defiant speeches and Russian shells raining down on Kharkiv, another image went viral: thousands of Ukrainian women and children, clutching pets and suitcases, trudging across the Polish border, and met by thousands of Poles offering hot food, warm clothes, and even places in their homes. As we soon learned from the American press, at that time, President Andrzej Duda and the Polish government were among the few insisting to Washington and Western Europe that Kyiv would not fall in three days, and that urgent, full-scale military aid to the Ukrainians was essential.
In 2022, Poland led the way in supplying tanks and planes to Ukraine. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jarosław Kaczyński were among the first Western high officials to visit Kyiv that spring. Warsaw and Kyiv were preparing to sign a sweeping strategic partnership agreement.
For a moment, Polish domestic politics seemed suspended. In spring 2022, internal disputes faded as the entire political class, left to right, rallied behind Ukraine’s cause. On the international stage, Warsaw relished pointing fingers at Germany and France for years of failed appeasement of Moscow. It was symptomatic that the Polish prosecutor’s office “failed” to detain a Ukrainian diver suspected of sabotaging Nord Stream 2 in German territorial waters. When Duda addressed the Ukrainian parliament that June, he declared: “Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women and children are not refugees [in Poland], they are our guests.”
That phrase captures Polish warmth but also contains a telling ambiguity. Indeed, at the time, even Poland’s far-right Confederation, a union of alt-right forces or PiS’s right wing, traditionally anti-Ukrainian, called anyone questioning support for Ukraine a “Russian agent.” But a refugee has rights as well as obligations; a guest, by contrast, depends entirely on the host’s goodwill. So when the romantic infatuation between the two nations faded, it turned out that Ukraine became a toxic topic in Polish politics. You could build little on sympathies for Ukrainians, but you could lose a lot.
By summer 2022, Polish parties were competing over who could hit Russia harder and praise Kyiv louder. Poland backed every EU sanctions package, cut off most visas for Russians (except for a humanitarian one), and welcomed for an extended period more than a million Ukrainians affected by war. The media was abuzz with stories of newfound friendships between the people and the states.
The idyll did not last. The atmosphere started to change in autumn. Zelenskyy visited Washington and Paris, but not Warsaw. Kyiv refused even symbolic gestures on sensitive memory politics, such as lifting its block on exhumations of Volhynia massacre victims, something Poland had especially pushed for since the mid-2010s. Online, false stories gained traction about Ukrainian ladies being allowed to cut in line at hospitals, and less false ones – about Ukrainian men driving expensive cars. Far-right politician Grzegorz Braun, already known for anti-COVID and antisemitic remarks, went on tour around the country with the slogan “Stop the Ukrainianization of Poland.”
The spark that triggered the first powerful wave of Ukraine criticism in Poland’s mainstream was the fall of debris from a Ukrainian air-defense missile in the village of Przewodów, killing two people. Zelenskyy and his team stubbornly claimed it was a Russian missile – most likely trying to present the incident as a direct attack on a NATO state and thereby mobilize the Alliance to provide more support. This denialism infuriated Poles: after all, no one was blaming Ukraine; Russia had started the war, so why insist so much? Kyiv’s refusal to take responsibility was seen as ingratitude.
Even greater irritation came with the grain crisis of 2023. To support Kyiv economically, the EU had opened its market to Ukrainian agricultural products, expecting them to move in transit. Instead, with the help of local businesses that looked for quick profits, they flooded local markets, undercutting Polish farmers. Though farmers are a small part of Poland’s society and economy, their protests against EU climate policy and Ukrainian food exports were supported by over 80% of Poles. Since this coincided with the parliamentary campaign, politicians of all stripes joined the chorus against Ukrainian grain.
The Polish government again expected Kyiv to treat the matter in a special Polish context and, out of gratitude, drop its complaint against Poland’s embargo before the European Commission. For Zelenskyy, however, this was a simple economic issue, without special bilateral meaning. While both liberals and conservatives, Donald Tusk and Mateusz Morawiecki, posted TikTok videos about “poisonous wheat”, it quickly became clear that the far right played the anti-Ukrainian theme best. Confederation supporters not only organized transport blockades on the Polish-Ukrainian border but also spilled grain from wagons meant only to transit through Poland. “Ungrateful” and “demanding” – these two words, since then, have stuck to the Ukrainian leadership.
Soon, “ungrateful” and “demanding” became the buzzwords attached to Ukrainian refugees, too. Polish politics is often described as a “dictatorship of polls” – and in 2023, the polls changed. No longer over 90%, but only 60% of Poles supported accepting Ukrainians affected by the war; support for military aid to Kyiv also dropped. Social moods were summed up and reinforced by Zbigniew Parafianowicz’s bestselling book Poland at War. Complete with bitter quotes of a dozen “high-ranking Polish politicians well acquainted with the behind-the-scenes of Polish-Ukrainian cooperation in 2021–2023,” this text described how Poles gave Ukrainians all the equipment they needed and their hearts, and in return received malice and a plastic bag of meaningless medals. The book instantly became the bible of political realists from the center to the right. The refrain was everywhere: the Ukrainians are exploiting us, and we need to be tougher.
In 2023, neither PiS, which won the elections but could not form a government, nor Civic Coalition (KO), which took the helm of a centrist-left coalition, questioned full military and logistical support for Kyiv or its Euro-Atlantic aspirations. The effort was instead to separate topics: yes, migration and agriculture could be fields of political speculation, but in national security, the consensus should prevail.
But by the 2025 presidential campaign, the wall came down. At the very beginning of the race, PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki, soon echoed by liberal challenger Rafał Trzaskowski, proposed cutting the “800 plus” family benefit for Ukrainian refugees who did not work or pay taxes. Initially a Confederation idea proclaimed two years earlier, it now drew support from a staggering 88% of Poles — near-total consensus in a deeply divided country.
Nawrocki pressed further. In March 2025, he suggested moving Ukrainians to the back of doctors’ queues, explicitly invoking an urban legend of their supposed privileges. After winning the election, he vetoed a refugee aid bill and called not only for cutting family benefits to the unemployed but also for stripping them of access to the national health system.
Chasing Confederation voters before the final battle for the Presidential Palace, Nawrocki visited Confederation leader Sławomir Mentzen, who had won nearly 15% in the first round. During a YouTube-streamed conversation, Nawrocki signed Mentzen’s program declaration, promising, among other things, to block Ukraine’s NATO membership and refuse to send a Polish contingent eastward even in the event of a ceasefire. Trzaskowski rejected these points at the time, but just months after losing, KO placed adverts on social media with the same slogan – no Polish troops in Ukraine, and proposed its own bill, which likewise radically cuts aid to Ukrainian refugees. Anti-Ukrainianism has crossed into the mainstream, no longer confined to the far right.
Cutting benefits to single mothers or pensioners caring for grandchildren and physically not able to work may be cruel, but it does not endanger the state. The absence of lasting peace in Ukraine does. Yet it seems that Polish politicians are willing to risk even that for the sake of polling numbers.
For now, Confederation plays the anti-Ukrainian card most effectively. It is hard to say what exactly contributed more to Mentzen’s support – distrust in the social security and tax system, or hostility toward Ukrainians. But it is worth noting that after both President Nawrocki and the KO government ultimately declared that “800 plus” would only go to working Ukrainian refugees, their parties’ ratings rose while support for Confederation dropped.
As ever, much in Polish politics will depend on Washington. Warsaw’s eastward policy has always mirrored America’s. Donald Trump’s hard line on Ukraine appeals to the Polish right, even to PiS, once firmly anti-Russian. With Poland’s defense model built on what might be called “security on subscription” — stationing as many NATO troops on its soil as possible and buying the latest American weaponry — it is hard to imagine Warsaw striking a radically different line on Ukraine from the US one.
Zelenskyy, wary of Trump’s mood swings, has turned increasingly to Europe. That should align with the current Polish government; yet, during a recent European leaders’ visit to the White House, Poland was notably absent.
In the 2023 campaign, the issue of the Volhynia massacre also returned to Polish politics. Under sustained official and unofficial pressure, Kyiv unblocked the question of exhuming UPA victims, and in September 2025, the first burial of victims’ remains took place in the village of Puźniki. Although everyone in Poland demands exhumations, from municipal councillors to the president, the highest-ranking participant at the ceremony was only Senate Speaker Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska.
Of course, it takes two to tango. Ukrainian authorities still treat much of Poland’s support as self-evident. Playing the “Ukraine card” in Polish domestic politics would have been far harder if exhumations had begun years earlier, or had Polish businesses been assured a fundamental role in Ukraine’s reconstruction.
On the other hand, Ukrainians increasingly see Poles as too emotional a partner — one whose decisions are driven less by rational calculation than by surges of feeling. But Ukraine, worn down by nightly shelling and American pressure, has no shortage of emotions of its own.
First published in September 2025. Translated from Polish by Olena Babakova.
The article was written in the framework of the project Reflections of the War in Ukraine in Visegrad Countries. The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
SPECIÁLNÍ ČÍSLO/SPECIAL EDITION