Dr. Dominika Blachnicka-Ciacek of the University of Warsaw told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that integration is inherently a two-way street — and while Ukrainians have largely embraced it, Poles have been slower to reciprocate.
"Very often even those Ukrainians who speak fluent Polish and work with Poles admit it's not very easy to become friends with us", she said.
That reluctance stands in contrast to the response Poland mounted when the full-scale invasion began, when 70% of the population helped Ukrainians in some way and 7% opened their homes to refugees, Blachnicka-Ciacek said. She pointed to data from the Stand with Ukraine foundation showing hostility toward Ukrainians first spiked noticeably during last year's presidential campaign — a shift she said has left many Ukrainians newly wary of using their own language in public.
"This sense of fear seems to be something that wasn't there before", she said.
A diaspora study built on interviews and shared work
The findings come from a broader research project Blachnicka-Ciacek led with Dr. Anna Matyska, professor Agnieszka Trąbka and doctoral candidate Gabriela Bestrzyńska, examining how Ukraine's diaspora, which is one of the largest in the world, estimated at up to 20 million people, mobilized for humanitarian relief after 2022. More than a million Ukrainians already lived in Poland before that year; roughly as many arrived afterward.
The team conducted 165 interviews across two phases, the second focused on social media use, and spent time embedded in diaspora life — attending poetry readings and stand-up performances, and joining volunteers weaving camouflage netting for soldiers at the front.
Unlike the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States, where aid organizations are older and more formally structured, assistance efforts among Ukrainians in Poland tend to be improvised and grassroots, the researchers found. Some of that reflects skepticism toward official channels: donors often insist on direct contact with the soldiers or units receiving supplies, wanting proof, such as confirmation from a unit that netting or vests arrived, that help reached its intended recipient.
Divides within the diaspora itself
The study also surfaced sharp differences in how men and women experienced the war from abroad. Women, Blachnicka-Ciacek said, more easily converted a sense of duty into action, organizing collections, hosting refugees or coordinating aid drives. For men who had settled in Poland before the war, the calculus was murkier: many felt pressure to prove their loyalty by weighing a return to Ukraine for military service, even as they balanced obligations to relatives in both countries.
"No matter how much they do and how involved they get in helping Ukraine, in the end the question always comes up: is it enough?" she said.
Tension also emerged between longtime Ukrainian residents and those displaced by the war. Refugees who arrived after February 2022 were quickly granted national identification numbers, work authorization and financial assistance — benefits that earlier migrants, some of whom spent years cycling in and out of temporary residency status, had struggled for years to obtain, according to the study.
Language became another dividing line. Ukrainians who settled in Poland before 2022 were disproportionately from the country's Ukrainian-speaking west; those who fled after the invasion were more likely to come from the Russian-speaking east and south, and some later switched to Ukrainian under social pressure from fellow migrants. Today, Blachnicka-Ciacek said, Ukrainians in Poland move fluidly between both Ukrainian and Polish — a detail reflected in her own research, where nearly every interview, given respondents' choice of language, was conducted in Polish.
The project, funded by Poland's National Science Centre, has also produced a podcast, "Ukraina Globalnie" ("Ukraine Globally"), exploring grassroots aid, shifting diaspora identity, the turn toward Ukrainian-language use, social media disinformation, and the experiences of Ukrainians serving in the Israeli military.
(jh)
Source: PAP