‘Teach your daughter to speak Polish’: Ukrainians in Poland face growing resentment

Valeriia Kholkina was out buying ice-cream with her husband and four-year-old daughter when a man overheard them speaking Ukrainian. “Teach your daughter to speak Polish,” said the stranger. Then he physically assaulted both parents. People take part in an independence march in Warsaw, Poland. Political debate in Poland has moved to the right.Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images A sports hall of Hrubieszow, Poland, that was transformed into an accommodation facility for refugees fleeing Russia’s invasion Ukraine, in March 2022.Photograph: Jakub Orzechowski/Agencja Wyborcza.pl/Reuters The Polish president, Karol Nawrocki, giving a speech in Warsaw on 11 November.Photograph: Rafał Guz/EPA The incident, which happened in the city of Szczecin in north-west Poland, reflects an increasingly hostile atmosphere for Ukrainians in the country, a dramatic turnaround from the mood in 2022. Then, in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Poles put on a show of support and hospitality for their neighbours , volunteering at the border and offering up their homes to refugees. Now, that outpouring of goodwill is wearing thin, as the war approaches its fourth anniversary, and surveys show an increasingly negative perception of Ukrainians in Poland , stoked by a political debate that has moved further to the right on migration and the resurfacing of historical grievances. There are about a million Ukrainian refugees in Poland, according to UNHCR statistics from September. Kholkina is not one of them; she is one of nearly half a million Ukrainians in the country who arrived prior to 2022, and has lived in Poland for more than a decade. “I’m more Polish than Ukrainian now ... but I never thought someone would lecture me on how to talk to my own family,” she said. Since the assault, she has panic attacks, and has told her daughter to never speak Ukrainian in public. Her experience was extreme - and the attacker ended up being sentenced to 14 months in prison - but the experience of receiving abuse for speaking Ukrainian in public has become widespread. “Things feel more tense now,” said Aliona, a 39-year-old entrepreneur who lives in a small town in western Poland. “Nowadays, when we go out, the kids whisper: ‘Mum, let’s speak Polish now.’ It wasn’t like this before. No one used to comment. Even if they heard my accent, they’d just smile,” she said. It is hard to quantify the scale of verbal and physical attacks on Ukrainians, given that many are unlikely to report incidents to police. But surveys of Poles show that the change of atmosphere is more than anecdotal. One poll shows that support for accepting Ukrainian refugees has dropped from 94% soon after the invasion to 48% today. Another survey shows Polish support for Ukraine joining the EU is down to 35%, from 85% in 2022. “There is an attitude in society that we don’t owe anything to the Ukrainians any more,” said Piotr Buras, of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw. Many things have combined to bring about this change of feeling. Resentment...

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