Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has vowed to combat a rising wave of violence against Ukrainians after police recorded 180 hate crimes in the first half of 2026 — a third more than the previous year. Following the brutal beating of a young Ukrainian couple in Wroclaw and a verbal attack on a 13-year-old girl in Bielsko-Biala, Tusk told his cabinet that attackers had grown brazen because they felt politically emboldened.
The violence coincides with the worst diplomatic crisis between Warsaw and Kyiv since Russia's invasion. President Karol Nawrocki revoked Poland's highest honour from Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the Ukrainian leader named an army unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a World War II-era militia responsible for massacres of Polish civilians. Public support for hosting the roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians in Poland has eroded sharply, with a majority now opposing further refugee intake.
Meanwhile, Polish and Ukrainian teams continue exhuming victims of the Volhynia massacres, and the human rights ombudsman's office says official hate-crime figures undercount the reality.