Sept. 28, 2025, 11:33 p.m.
(PHOTO: AP)
On September 17, the Polish Senate passed without amendments a bill on assistance to Ukrainians who arrived in Poland after February 24, 2022, in connection with the hostilities unleashed by Russia on the territory of Ukraine. Earlier, on September 12, the Sejm adopted this draft law, and on September 9, the Council of Ministers of Poland adopted it. The law "On Amendments to Certain Laws to Verify the Right to Family Benefits for Foreigners and on the Conditions for Providing Assistance to Ukrainian Citizens in Connection with the Military Conflict on the Territory of this State" was signed by Polish President Karol Navrotsky or defend his similar bill.
The fact is that the period of legal stay of Ukrainian citizens who arrived in Poland after February 24, 2022 in connection with the hostilities on the territory of Ukraine was extended until September 30, 2025. The amending law was published in the Journal of Laws and entered into force on July 1 this year. This law also amended the provisions preventing illegal stay of Ukrainian citizens and facilitating the legalization of their stay in Poland. In general, the following have been extended until September 30, 2025: validity of legal residence and national visas of Ukrainian citizens; validity of legal residence permits of Ukrainian citizens; terms of departure from the territory of Poland of Ukrainian citizens legally residing in Poland; terms for voluntary return (i.e., voluntary departure) specified in decisions issued to Ukrainian citizens on the obligation of a foreigner to return; validity of legal residence permits, Polish identity documents, documents
August 25 was a black day for many Ukrainians who moved to Poland: it became known that the new President of Poland, Karol Navrotsky, had vetoed the document. As a result, the legal period of stay for Ukrainians who fled the war ends on September 30.
Karol Navrotsky. PHOTO: Polish Radio
"We remain open to providing assistance to Ukrainian citizens... The strategic goal of the Polish state... has not changed either: Poland's interest is to provide military support to Ukraine... But after three and a half years, our law must be changed. The Law on Assistance to Citizens of Ukraine does not contain the amendment that caused a public debate, namely that the 800+ assistance should be paid to Ukrainians who perform compulsory labor," Navrotsky said.
The amendment to the law, which was vetoed by the president, provided for the extension of temporary protection granted to Ukrainian citizens fleeing the war until March 4, 2026. It brought Polish legislation in line with the EU Council's executive decision of June 25, 2024.
Navrotsky's veto could de facto mean a halt to funding for satellite internet via Starlink for Ukraine. This was pointed out by Krzysztof Gawkowski, Minister of Digitalization of Poland, who wrote on the X platform: "Karol Nawrocki turns off the Internet for Ukraine with his decision."
Marek Georgica , a spokesman for the Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs , explained that starting from October 1, Poland will not be able to pay for Starlink subscriptions for Ukraine. After all, the fund that financed it acted on the basis of a vetoed law that extended the period of assistance until the end of March next year. Now there are no legal grounds for further financing of the subscription.
After Nawrocki vetoed the amendments to the law "On Assistance to Citizens of Ukraine," he and the government prepared their own bills. The government's draft passed the Sejm and the Senate unchanged. The presidential draft is currently undergoing public consultations that will last until September 25.
The presidential bill contains the proposals mentioned by Navrotskyi when he announced his veto. The first one concerns changes to the Criminal Code: the term of imprisonment for illegal crossing of the Polish border and for organizing such a crossing is increased. The government bill does not provide for such a change.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Another change proposed by the president was the introduction of punishment for "propaganda of Banderaism" and the activities of the OUN-UPA on the same grounds as for propaganda of Nazism, communism, or fascism. According to the presidential draft, a person who "publicly promotes Nazi, communist, fascist ideology, the ideology of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Banderites, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or ideology that calls for violent actions to influence political or social life" will be punished by up to three years in prison. In addition, the Institute of National Remembrance will be responsible for recording, collecting, storing, developing, preserving, providing access to and publishing documents relating to crimes committed against persons of Polish nationality or Polish citizens of other nationalities between November 8, 1917 and July 31, 1990 by members of the OUN-B and UPA and other Ukrainian formations that collaborated with the Third Reich.
The third change, which was also not included in the government's bill, is an amendment to the Polish Citizenship Act: the minimum period of continuous residence in Poland required for a foreigner to be recognized as a Polish citizen is increased from 3 to 10 years.
Both the presidential draft and the government's already adopted one contain provisions that make the payment of certain types of benefits to foreigners dependent on professional activity in Poland. However, Navrotsky's draft law applies only to Ukrainian citizens and focuses on childcare benefits ("800+"). The government's draft law applies to all foreigners from third countries and establishes the principles of 800+ and the Good Start program.
Both documents extend the period of temporary protection in Poland until March 4, 2026. The list of grounds for revocation of a temporary residence permit issued for one year has been expanded. The documents amend the definition of collective accommodation centers: they increase the minimum number of residents required for a center to be considered as such from 10 to 20 people. The bills set the deadline for accepting refugees from Ukraine into collective accommodation centers at October 31, 2025. The cases when a voivode can evict a Ukrainian citizen from a center have been clarified.
Both the governmental and presidential bills provide for restrictions on the right of adult Ukrainians to receive medical services in Poland. Navrotsky proposes that access to medical services should be limited to insured persons who pay a mandatory or voluntary health insurance premium. The government document, on the other hand, limits access to medical services to a list of benefits that uninsured adult citizens of Ukraine can enjoy. These include health care programs, medical rehabilitation, dental treatment, drug treatment programs, planned orthopedic surgeries, and drug programs. These decisions are aimed at preventing abuse (for example, when people come to Poland solely to receive medical care) and reducing the burden on the healthcare system. The innovations will not apply to children under 18 and those who will reach this age during treatment.
Maciej Duszczyk. PHOTO: Yle
Deputy Minister of the Interior Maciej Duszczyk hopes that the president will sign the government's bill in its current version. However, a new veto of the law by the president is not excluded: during the Senate's work, amendments submitted by the presidential Law and Justice party regarding the granting of Polish citizenship only after ten years of continuous legal residence in Poland and the punishment for propaganda of a prohibited ideology were rejected. Such a scenario would be the worst for Ukrainian refugees.
According to the Office for Foreigners, as of February 24, 2025, there were 1.55 million Ukrainians in Poland, 993 thousand of whom were on the basis of PESEL UKR. The UKR status allows Ukrainians to legally stay in Poland, work without obtaining a special permit, use medical services in public hospitals free of charge, and have access to social assistance.
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Poles have been fully engaged in helping Ukrainians. Polish politicians and diplomats began sending military equipment and weapons from their own warehouses to the eastern border, and in the international arena, they convinced their allies that Ukraine would survive and should be supported. Ordinary Poles collected humanitarian aid, personally transporting it to the border or even to the combat areas. Thousands of Polish residents gave shelter to Ukrainian families fleeing the war, often with just a hastily packed suitcase with the most basic necessities.
However, three years later, there is no trace of this impulse. In addition to the negative behavior of some Ukrainian citizens who found themselves in Poland, unfavorable trends for Ukrainians in Poland have been evident for a long time. However, the events of recent weeks stand out even against this rather gloomy background.
Coincidentally or not, a new round of this story began immediately after the inauguration of Polish President Karol Navrotsky.
He could hardly be called a pro-Ukrainian politician even before he was elected president, when he headed the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. In this position, he proved himself to be a supporter of conservative, nationalistic views on the history of his country. The dominant theme of Polish historical policy under Navrotsky was the events in Volyn during World War II and their explicit anti-Ukrainian assessment in Poland. For a long time, the two countries have been unable to develop a common view of the massacres of Poles in Galicia and Volhynia committed by Ukrainian nationalist partisans during World War II and the massacres of Ukrainians.
Even three years into Russia's full-scale invasion, when Poland remained Ukraine's closest ally, the ghosts of the past divide the two nations.
During the presidential campaign, Navrotsky repeatedly stated that good relations between Ukraine and Poland would only be possible after Kyiv "resolves historical issues" with Warsaw. Without this, he said, Poland would not allow Ukraine to join the EU and NATO. According to Nawrocki, the dominant theme of Polish historical policy, instead of the conventional "Katyn" and the related myth of the Polish people's struggle for a democratic Poland, is the conventional "Volyn" with its obvious anti-Ukrainian sentiment.
Election posters in Poland. PHOTO: REPORTER
Nawrocki's election rhetoric about Ukraine was not limited to Volyn. During the campaign, he claimed that Ukrainians "create problems in queues at hospitals and clinics" and that Ukrainians "should not live better in Poland than Poles."
According to Polish Newsweek's interlocutors in the future president's entourage, these statements went beyond pre-election populism: "This is not a cold calculation. Nawrocki simply has such convictions... He is absolutely anti-Ukrainian."
On the other hand, journalist Karolina Lewicka said, Navrotsky's attitude toward Ukraine will "mirror" public sentiment. If Polish society becomes more and more negative towards Ukraine and Ukrainians, it would be naive to expect a different attitude from the president.
Nawrocki's attitude toward Ukraine is rational and pragmatic. He believes that it is in Poland's interest to provide military support to Kyiv in order to keep aggressive Russia physically as far away from Poland's borders as possible. On the other hand, he is strongly opposed to the participation of the Polish military in any contingent that may be sent to Ukraine as part of the peace process, which unites Nawrocki with the mainstream of Polish politics. He states: "Ukraine is not grateful enough to Poland for the support it provides. According to the BBC, there is a popular opinion in Navrotsky's circle that Zelenskyy "betrayed" Poland by making Berlin, not Warsaw, his key European partner.
Many observers have been concerned about how the relationship between Navrotsky and the government of Donald Tusk, who holds most of the levers of influence on the situation in the country and whom the leader of the presidential Law and Justice party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, considers his antagonist, would develop. Throughout the campaign, Nawrocki did not hide the fact that his goal would be to overthrow Tusk's government. Of course, Nawrocki will be able to block the government's initiatives until the parliamentary elections, whether regular or early, but too much overt sabotage of the government's work may disappoint a large part of the electorate.
The introduction of two bills concerning Ukrainians who find themselves in Poland by the will of fate shows that the confrontation between Navrotsky and Tusk will only grow. This may add to the negative feelings of Ukrainians living in Poland.
Before the Second World War, this territory was part of Poland, but it was inhabited mainly by Ukrainians. In 1939, the USSR took control of Volyn, and in 1941 it was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 as the underground military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a movement that had been waging a guerrilla campaign in Poland since 1929. The OUN sought to create an independent Ukrainian state and during World War II considered Poland, the Soviet Union, and Germany to be its enemies. Because of this, Stepan Bandera, the leader of one of the two factions of the OUN, spent most of the war in German prison. At various times, however, the OUN tried to negotiate with the Nazi occupiers, and some OUN members helped the Germans kill Jews. But the main victims of the UPA's violent campaign were civilians from the Polish minority.
Attitudes toward the Volyn tragedy in Poland are very mixed. PHOTO: Getty Images
Estimates of the number of victims vary greatly. Poland's state-sponsored INP says that 100,000 Poles died at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists in 1942-1945 in Volyn, neighboring regions, and territories that are part of modern Poland. Ukrainian historian Serhiy Plokhy, director of the Institute for Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University, speaks of 60-90 thousand victims on the Polish side. Most of them were not shot, but killed with extreme cruelty.
Between 10 and 15 thousand Ukrainians were killed by Poles in self-defense or revenge. There were also cases when Ukrainian partisans killed Ukrainians who sympathized with the Poles.
After the war, Volhynia and Galicia became part of Soviet Ukraine. The Poles who survived in these territories were forced to leave for the new Polish state, whose borders shifted to the west. They kept the memory of what their families went through, but against the backdrop of other atrocities of World War II, the history of the massacre remained almost unknown outside of Poland. It was only in the early 1990s that Polish historians were able to get to the sites of the massacres and begin exhuming the bodies of the victims.
In Ukraine, opposition to the study of these events has grown, especially after the Russian annexation of Crimea and the occupation of part of Donbas in 2014. Under these circumstances, more and more Ukrainians began to perceive the OUN and its most famous leaders, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, as heroes of the struggle against Russian and Soviet rule. Among the historians who participated in this process was Volodymyr Viatrovych. From 2014 to 2019, he headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, where he participated in shaping Ukrainians' views of their past.
Viatrovych considers what happened in 1943 not the "Volyn Massacre" but the "Volyn Tragedy," an episode of mutual bloodshed. The scholar concluded that Ukrainian peasants often spontaneously attacked their Polish neighbors after years of oppression by the Polish authorities. He claims that the UPA command never directly ordered the killing of Poles. In addition, according to him, thousands of Ukrainians were killed by Poles in retaliatory actions. Estimating the number of victims of these events, he speaks of 50,000 Poles killed and points to a study by the Catholic University of Lviv, which names the figure of 30,000 Ukrainians killed by Poles.
"There are no documents that would indicate that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for an ethnically pure Ukrainian state," the historian says.
Yes, ethnic cleansing was not an official policy of Bandera's organization. However, in May 1941, the OUN Instructions on the Struggle and Activities of the OUN During the War, edited by Bandera and Shukhevych, were published. The section "Clearing the territory of the enemy element" reads: "In times of chaos and confusion, one can afford to eliminate undesirable Polish, Muscovite, and Jewish figures, especially supporters of Bolshevik-Moscow imperialism." The text of the document is available on the website of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
One of the leaders of the OUN, Yaroslav Stetsko, wrote to the Nazi leadership with a proposal to use German methods in the fight against Jews in Ukraine. The original letter, written in Ukrainian, openly states his support for the extermination of Jews and the use of "German methods of extermination" against them. Both documents were published by historians Mark Tsarynnyk and Karl Berkhoff in the Journal of the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University.
Polish historian and political scientist Łukasz Adamski emphasizes that there is no written order from the OUN/UPA to kill Poles in Volyn. However, in an order from 1944 regarding Eastern Galicia, UPA Commander-in-Chief Shukhevych ordered that Poles be persuaded to leave for Poland, and if they did not agree, they were to be killed.
In 2016, the Polish parliament recognized the Volyn massacre as genocide. This was part of a rise in nationalist sentiment on both sides of the border. In 2017, Ukraine banned the exhumation of Polish victims, although it continued to allow the reburial of the bodies of German soldiers from World War II. Kyiv claimed that the ban was a response to Warsaw's refusal to restore the desecrated monument to UPA fighters in Poland.
The conflict over the events of eighty years ago escalated with the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Poland has received millions of Ukrainian refugees.
Many Polish politicians have begun threatening to block Ukraine's integration with the European Union if the reburial is not granted. At first, Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to meet them halfway. However, shortly after Donald Trump won the US election, Kyiv changed its position, possibly deciding that Ukraine needed European friends. In November 2024, it was announced that Ukraine would not oppose exhumations on its territory.
Ukrainians and Poles talk about difficult issues of shared history at discussions organized by the Polish-Ukrainian Reconciliation Association, founded by Karolina Romanowska. She recognizes that Russia uses the topic of mass murder to sow discord between Ukrainians and Poles. But when friends speak openly about problems, it does not help their enemies.
Currently, the temperature of Polish-Ukrainian relations has dropped so much that most Polish politicians have refrained from publicly congratulating Ukraine on its Independence Day. The changes experienced by Ukrainians in Poland are all the more noticeable in contrast to the situation three years ago. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, between 50% and 70% of Polish residents were involved in helping Ukrainians. However, a CBOS study from February 2025 showed that the number of Poles who openly express antipathy towards Ukrainians was 38%, and for the first time in many years exceeded the number of those who continue to feel sympathy for them - 30%.
Ukrainians in Poland. PHOTO: Ukrainer
In the future, the Polish authorities may look at the situation from a pragmatic point of view: if Ukrainians leave the country, it could have a negative impact on the Polish economy. According to a March report by the Bank of National Economy, Ukrainians account for about 5% of the total number of people employed in Poland. Most of them are employed in the industrial sector, construction, transportation, and services. Ukrainians account for 0.5 to 2.4% of Polish GDP growth.
As the Polish authorities change their attitude towards Ukrainians, the attitude of other citizens of this country will also change.
Володимир Шкаєв