Eurasia Press & News
Clouds gathered again over Polish-Ukrainian relations in the spring and summer of 2026. After a Ukrainian Armed Forces unit was named after the “heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
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,” Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, of the Order of the White Eagle. In response, Ukrainian politicians, including three former presidents, began publicly returning Polish state awards—and Polish officials were quick to respond in kind. The dispute went beyond symbolism: Warsaw signalled it would not support Ukraine’s EU accession unless Kiev revised its historical memory policy, and the agreement to transfer Polish fighter jets to Ukraine in exchange for drones and technology was called into question. Meanwhile, anti-Ukrainian sentiment is rising in Poland, visible both in opinion polls and in a growing number of hate crimes against Ukrainian citizens.
All of this stands in stark contrast to the enthusiasm of the winter and spring of 2022, when President Andrzej Duda proclaimed that the two countries would soon have no border between them and that Ukraine would “become a fraternal state for Poland for centuries.” Polish-Ukrainian relations were then at their highest point in modern history, and support for Ukraine—along with sympathy for Ukrainians—reached unprecedented levels in Polish society. However, it should be noted that the underlying reasons for the Poles’ enthusiasm during this period were not so much related to Ukraine itself as to Poland’s self-positioning within the context of broader interaction between Russia and Europe. The end of Moscow’s special relations with individual European capitals, the de facto severance of Russian energy supplies to Europe, the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, and the sharp increase in Poland’s strategic weight in European affairs—all of this Warsaw had long wanted but found hard to achieve. Getting there quickly and at minimal cost was, in effect, a gift from historical circumstance.
February 2022 was the third milestone in the modern history of Polish-Ukrainian relations. The first was the “Orange Revolution”: the events of late 2004 in Kiev sparked a rare moment of unity among the Polish political class and ignited genuine enthusiasm among the masses, evoking a sense of reliving the “1989 moment.” That year is of paramount importance in Polish political mythology, serving as a symbol of the final attainment of sovereignty, and in the symbolic hierarchy, it ranks above the end of World War II. Moreover, it is believed that the chain of events that led to regime change in Eastern European countries was triggered in the early 1980s by Polish Solidarity (in this telling, the role of the regimes themselves in this process, as well as the impetus received from Moscow, fade into the background). The Maidan was read as a continuation of this process, its expected outcome being the final expulsion of Russia from this key part of post-Soviet Europe. It is fair to say that the solidarity rallies held for the Orange Revolution across Polish cities were directed less at Ukraine than against Russia.
Beneath the romantic aura of Polish support for Ukraine—by which was meant exclusively Viktor Yushchenko’s supporters, with the roughly half of the country that voted for Viktor Yanukovych denied any political agency—lay a sober calculation. Poland, represented by its ruling class, saw itself as the driving force behind Ukraine’s future European integration and offered to act as its advocate in the EU. A special Polish-Ukrainian partnership, with Poland in the leading role, served two purposes at once: strengthening its influence in the neighbouring country and its clout in Brussels. Poland had joined the EU only months earlier but was already staking out an active role on the eastern flank. The leading EU powers were unenthusiastic at first, wary of the effect on relations with Russia, but within a few years Warsaw was spearheading the Eastern Partnership initiative.
Bilateral relations reached their true heyday in the following years, particularly under Lech Kaczyński’s presidency (2005–2010), with Poland acting as Ukraine’s chief advocate in the EU and NATO and, notably, lobbying hard for the 2008 Membership Action Plan. But while foreign policy saw mutual understanding, the internal transformation the Orange Revolution was meant to unlock never materialized: the winning coalition fell apart almost immediately, plunging the country into chronic political instability, while imbalances built up during the economic boom of the early 2000s produced overheating and then a precipitous collapse in the 2008–2009 global crisis. Warsaw and Kiev did achieve an unprecedented rapprochement on historical policy—only for Yushchenko’s presidency to end on the sour note of awarding Stepan Bandera
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the title Hero of Ukraine, an affront to Poland that Yanukovych later revoked.
Ukraine’s 2014 change of government marked the second milestone in modern Polish-Ukrainian relations. The Association Agreement with the EU and the subsequent EU-Ukraine Free Trade Area sharply increased Poland’s weight as a trade and logistics partner—by 2021 it ranked second only to China in Ukraine’s foreign trade turnover. At the same time, labour migration from Ukraine to Poland began building, intensifying after the EU introduced visa-free travel for Ukrainians in 2017: between 2014 and 2019 the number of Ukrainian citizens living in Poland, permanently or temporarily, grew fivefold to roughly 1.5 million. This suited Warsaw on two counts, meeting its labour needs and giving it leverage in disputes with Brussels over refugee admissions. At the height of the EU migrant crisis, Poland flatly refused to accept refugees from the Middle East and Africa, pointing to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians already in the country, many displaced by the war in the east—and despite recurring friction with Brussels over the issue, Warsaw fended off every attempt to impose “culturally alien” migrants on it.
Between February and April 2022, Poland became the main EU entry point for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, many of whom stayed. According to the UMP Centre, by April 2022 the number of Ukrainian citizens in Poland, including new arrivals, reached a record 3.85 million—9% of the country’s population. In the major cities the figures were even more striking: 15% in Warsaw, 20% in Cracow, 28% in Gdańsk and Wrocław, 39% in Rzeszów. A significant share of these Ukrainians later moved on to other EU countries, but the influx had already created a new demographic reality—and new tensions—in a country that had been ethnically homogeneous for seven decades after World War II.
The economic context of Polish-Ukrainian relations has also shifted dramatically in the two decades since the Orange Revolution. In 1991 the two countries had roughly comparable GDP per capita by purchasing power parity—by some measures Ukraine’s was even higher—but by 2004 Poland’s was about 1.5 times higher, and by 2021 more than double. Ukrainians in Poland have become entrenched as migrant labour in low-status jobs, and the word “Ukrainian” itself has acquired such negative connotations that Poland’s educated class prefers to refer to them as “residents of Ukraine.” Reports of xenophobic incidents surfaced even before the wave of 2022 solidarity had fully subsided. Both everyday contact with migrants and the two governments’ policies function as irritants: Poles see Ukrainians as economic competitors and a burden on the welfare system, and accuse their own government of favouring them, while faulting Kiev for being cavalier about Polish concerns, particularly on historical policy.
Social benefits for Ukrainian refugees were a live issue in the 2025 presidential campaign, and this year refugees from Ukraine were put on equal footing with refugees from other countries. The total number of Ukrainian citizens in Poland is estimated at 1.5–1.9 million, of whom roughly 970,000 hold official refugee status. Outflow to other EU countries will continue, but most Ukrainians who settled in Poland before 2022 intend to stay for good.
One consequence of the mass migration—not yet fully reckoned with domestically—is the spread of Russian, the native language of most migrants from eastern and southern Ukraine. Phased out of Poland’s education system after 1989, Russian speech is nonetheless becoming a fixture of the linguistic landscape in Polish cities. Tensions over language and identity between the new arrivals and earlier waves of migrants (mostly from western Ukraine), as well as Poland’s own Ukrainian minority, may well become a factor in Polish life.
The Ukrainian community’s situation will keep being shaped by the foreign policy climate, where significant change is likely as the exclusive role Poland sought for itself erodes. Through its armed forces and military technology, Ukraine has become a valuable asset to the Western community—and is well aware of that. Kiev now has more important and influential military partners than Warsaw, which is precisely why its leadership can afford an assertive policy toward Poland, dictating the terms of cooperation. Returning the Order of the White Eagle to Nawrocki, Zelensky advised him to “build somewhat closer ties with Ukraine, which today defends Europe, including Poland.”
Yet Poles are roughly split on whether Ukraine is really defending Poland in its war with Russia. Ruling-camp politicians keep reiterating the Russian threat, and a May poll found 16.2% of Poles “strongly agree” that Ukraine is defending Poland and 37.7% “somewhat agree,” against 40% who disagree. A similar split appeared on whether transferring Polish weapons to Ukraine enhances Poland’s own security: 38.5% think it does, 42.2% believe it doesn’t. But even where a majority leans toward Zelensky’s position, that is no guarantee of sympathy for the Ukrainian leadership’s more combative moves against Poland, or for its reading of sensitive historical questions.
A new reality in Polish-Ukrainian relations is emerging from the armed conflict. Ukraine, leaning on its military strength, refuses to play junior partner or to give ground on memory policy. Polish leaders, for their part, keep repeating the mantra of strategic partnership while readily clashing with Kiev whenever economic interests are at stake, and bristle at Ukrainian attempts to drag Poland into a war with Russia or to weigh in on Polish domestic politics. Most of Polish society is unwilling to see itself as indebted to Ukraine; it expects gratitude for its support and grows embittered when that gratitude fails to appear. Ukrainians, for their part, increasingly treat Poland as a springboard to the rest of the EU.
Poland could easily transform from the driving force behind Ukraine’s European integration into a drag—and not solely because of historical grievances. In principle, Poles are not opposed to Ukraine becoming a member of the EU in the future, but they refuse to pay for it with their own prosperity. The share of those who support Ukraine’s rapid accession to the EU fell from 60% in March 2022 to 9% in July 2026, while the share of those who believe Ukraine should not join the EU at all rose from 2% to 40%. Although the current government firmly supports Ukraine’s European course, it cannot ignore these sentiments, and President Nawrocki has made the idea of Ukraine’s unacceptability as an unconditional EU member a centrepiece of his election platform.
The end of hostilities will raise a fresh set of questions. Will Poland be given a role in Ukraine’s reconstruction? Will new migration flows follow if its neighbour’s borders open? Will illegal arms trafficking become a bigger risk? What will the military balance between Poland and Ukraine look like once the fighting stops, and how will that shape Polish threat perceptions? For now, the answers can only be speculative. What is already clear is that the idealistic vision of Polish-Ukrainian cooperation from the early 2000s is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
