Police said the assault occurred on Sunday on Okulickiego Street, when three men attacked a 20-year-old Ukrainian woman and her 21-year-old partner.
Video shared online showed the men striking the man while the woman attempted to intervene. Police spokeswoman Aleksandra Freus told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that the violence followed an earlier dispute in a shop queue.
Multiple unsubstantiated narratives about the incident have since spread on X and Facebook, drawing tens of thousands of views. One widely shared post, amplified by a politician from the far-right Confederation party, claimed the woman had provoked the men in the shop with an obscene gesture, though the author cited no source.
That version contradicts an account given by the victim's mother, Karina Kitsai, who told the Ukrainian-language channel Slava TV that the men had tried to cut the queue by placing an open bottle in front of her daughter.
She said her daughter told them, "Excuse me, there's a queue here", and that when the men asked if she was Ukrainian, she replied that it made no difference — a response Kitsai said triggered verbal abuse from the group.
A second video, described online as showing the original shop confrontation and viewed 30,000 times on X, was also falsely linked to the case. Despite blurred faces, the footage shows a dispute between a young man and a dark-haired woman whose appearance does not match either the victim or the suspects.
A third claim came from the AI chatbot Grok on X, which suggested — based on unverified user comments — that video of the beating had been artificially generated. PAP said its own analysis using the detection tool Hive AI indicated the footage was likely genuine.
Public reaction to the case has divided along interpretive lines, according to a report from analytics firm Res Futura: about two-thirds of online commentators argued the attack was unrelated to nationality, citing footage of the Ukrainian man drawing a stun gun first, while a third pointed to the shop dispute as evidence of an ethnically motivated assault.
The report also identified a mix of emotional responses, including anger at the attackers, resentment toward Ukrainians as a group, and broader concern about social tensions.
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Source: PAP