A string of anti-Ukrainian incidents across Poland has prompted Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński to pledge zero tolerance and accuse the political right of stoking hostility toward the country's roughly 1.5 million Ukrainian residents.
In Bielsko-Biała, a man verbally abused Ukrainian girls on a bus and demanded they leave the country. Police in Sosnowiec arrested a suspect accused of attacking Ukrainians three times in recent weeks. In Łódź, a Polish citizen filed a complaint after being beaten by an assailant who mistook him for a Ukrainian.
The violence unfolds against a backdrop of historical tensions between Warsaw and Kyiv over Ukraine's veneration of the UPA, a nationalist militia that massacred ethnic Poles in 1943–45.