Polish police received 180 reports of suspected hate crimes against Ukrainian citizens in the first half of 2026, according to National Police Headquarters figures obtained by the newspaper Rzeczpospolita. That is more than 30 per cent up on the same period last year.

For comparison, the whole of 2024 produced 267 such reports and the whole of 2025 produced 275. If the first-half rate holds, 2026 finishes near 360 — the highest in recent years.

Two datasets, two different things

The conflict monitor ACLED counts something narrower and finds a steeper curve: 13 physical attacks on Ukrainian nationals in Poland so far in 2026, close to double the total for all of 2025, against just one in 2024.

The two figures are not in conflict and should not be averaged. The police number counts reports of hate crimes of every kind — physical attacks, threats, insults, other aggression — filed by Ukrainians in Poland. ACLED counts recorded incidents of physical violence only, from public reporting. One is a measure of what people report to the state; the other is a measure of what makes it into the public record as violence.

Both have a known weakness in the same direction. Reported hate crime undercounts, because reporting requires believing the report will go somewhere; and a rise in reports can partly reflect greater willingness to report rather than more incidents. Neither dataset can separate those effects. What is harder to explain away is the shape: one recorded physical attack in 2024, thirteen by late August 2026.

What the incidents look like

The pattern in the individual cases is consistent, and the trigger is usually language.

In Bielsko-Biała, a man verbally abused, threatened and insulted a group of Ukrainians including two eleven-year-old girls on a municipal bus; one of the girls recorded it. On 3 July in Poznań, two men linked to the Polish far right — one an ex-soldier suspected of espionage for Russia — confronted a Ukrainian woman running an office providing legal help to Ukrainians, demanded entry, and asked whether she supported Stepan Bandera. On 26 July in Wrocław, three men physically assaulted a Ukrainian couple in an attack police classified as nationality-motivated. In mid-August in Bydgoszcz, Ukraine’s consulate said a man and woman shouted obscenities and nationality-based threats at children, twisted a child’s arm and broke a toy drone, throwing the fragments at a boy.

Why now

Three explanations are being offered, and they are not mutually exclusive.

The first is history. Polish–Ukrainian relations have been strained this year over the Volhynia massacres of the 1940s and the naming of a Ukrainian military unit after a wartime figure. The exhumation question has been diplomatically live since 2017, when Ukraine imposed a moratorium after a UPA monument was dismantled in the Polish village of Hruszowice; the two sides agreed to resume exhumations in 2024, and work accelerated this summer, with excavation beginning in July at Ostrówki and Wola Ostrowiecka in Volhynia and President Zelensky announcing the opening of archives on the Volhynia killings.

The second is duration. Poland has hosted a very large Ukrainian population for four years. Researchers who study reception of displaced populations generally find that initial solidarity erodes as arrangements meant to be temporary become permanent and begin to compete with domestic priorities — a pattern observed across many host countries and not specific to Poland.

The third is deliberate amplification. NASK, the Polish state research institute’s disinformation analysis centre, recorded pro-Kremlin outlets seizing on genuine incidents involving Ukrainian nationals and repeating them until they read as evidence of a systemic problem. A NASK analyst told the Kyiv Independent the aim is to turn Polish opinion against Ukraine. Ukrainian media monitors have documented the same effort from their side.

The third explanation deserves a caution the coverage rarely supplies: identifying Russian amplification of an incident does not make the incident false, and treating every documented attack as a provocation is its own form of dismissal. The children on the bus in Bielsko-Biała were real.

The response

Natalia Panchenko of the group Stand With Ukraine in Poland argued for holding individual perpetrators to account rather than generalising, noting that Poland has courts and law enforcement and that many Poles have supported Ukraine for years.

Others want more from the state. Lev Zakharchyshyn, formerly Ukraine’s consul in Gdańsk, said Poland’s president had still not issued a distinct assessment of the attacks and voiced doubt that one would come — the argument being that a general commitment to the rule of law is not the same as a head of state naming a specific pattern of violence against a specific group.

ACLED’s own assessment is that how Poland responds may determine whether the trend continues. On the current data, that response has so far been made mostly by police officers filing reports.

Sources

Police figures from Poland’s National Police Headquarters via Rzeczpospolita, reported by Euronews and Caliber.Az; individual incidents and NASK disinformation findings via the Kyiv Independent and Euromaidan Press; physical-attack counts from ACLED; Volhynia context via East Reporter.