The boxing studio was small and designed in sleek black: black walls, black floors, big windows overlooking the snowy center of Warsaw. The women, some in their twenties, some decades older, some fit, some just getting there, stood in pairs. All were Ukrainian refugees who had found shelter in the Polish capital since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The place smelled of new rubber with a hint of sweat. “Let’s go, ladies, hit from the right!” called Aleksandra Sidorenko, a European lightweight boxing champion who goes by Sasha. Marta Pazdej, a short-haired and wiry woman in her mid-fifties, jumped forward and punched the air. Her partner leaped back, fists guarding her chin. Some of the women stumbled, started laughing. “Stop thinking!” Sasha shouted. “Once you start thinking, you lose!” When she coached me, I got what she meant: The more mindful I was, the steadier I felt. That’s why boxing is so powerful, Sasha told me. “It’s like in life: If you stand firmly on your feet, you can deal with anything.”
Boxing is an important part of Ukrainian culture. The country’s renowned boxing schools have produced many world champions, and Ukrainians are proud of their prowess. In Warsaw, the group of women refugees, organized by Ukraiński Dom, an NGO and community center for Ukrainians in Poland, started training in March 2025. The participants told me how much they loved it, how much they loved Sasha—her energy, her optimism. They told me boxing released their emotions and felt empowering. It was a morale boost they needed, they said. When Russia invaded, Polish people rushed to aid Ukrainian refugees, an outpouring of support that prompted the former U.S. ambassador to Poland to call the country a “humanitarian superpower.” But since 2022, attitudes toward displaced Ukrainians, the vast majority of whom are women, have soured. Support for accepting refugees dropped from 94 percent in early 2022 to 48 percent in late 2025.
Social media buzzes with accusations. Ukrainian women are stealing Polish husbands, taking Polish jobs, clogging the health care system. The 2025 presidential election campaign was shaped by the Ukrainian issue. After right-wing candidate Karol Nawrocki won, legislation was enacted curbing refugees’ rights. In September 2025, President Nawrocki announced that he wouldn’t sign any new laws that prolong special residency rights for Ukrainians fleeing the war, such as simplified access to the labor market and automatic legal stay, which have been in place since the beginning of the war. Those special rights expired on March 5, 2026. Other politicians, even more to the right, accused Ukrainians of bringing “AIDS, gangsters, and prostitutes” into Poland. Between 2023 and 2025, hate crimes against Ukrainians went up 49 percent. Poles have burned Ukrainian flags and cars. “It was terrifying,” said Uliana Ilnitska, a member of the boxing group.
Meanwhile, despite several rounds of peace talks, the war in Ukraine continues. Four years into the invasion, Russia controls about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory. Drones and missiles continue falling on Ukrainian cities and killing civilians. And although the influx has slowed, refugees keep seeking shelter in Poland. For the nearly one million Ukrainian refugees who are there and for those who continue to arrive, the inhospitable social climate means they must fight an uphill battle to rebuild their lives in their new home. Their ongoing struggles make it particularly important to ask how things went so awry. What is to blame for the worsening attitudes? Is there any way to right what went wrong?
Sometimes, when Marta hits the punching bag, she imagines it’s a Russian invader. The first time I met her, it was in her small, tidy room at a Jesuit refugee housing center in Warsaw, where she also works as a “translator-troubleshooter,” as she calls her job. Portraits of saints hung on the walls. A pillow on her bed declared her love for Ukraine.
When the war started, on February 24, 2022, she was in Lviv, her hometown in western Ukraine. Her first instinct was to write to the army and ask to join. But she got no answer. “Maybe that’s because I’m a woman of a certain age,” she said. She would have pushed to enlist, but her son, a college student, threatened that if she volunteered, he would, too. “I said: Oh, shit. I’m not that brave,” she told me. She left for Poland because her daughter was already there, studying at the University of Warsaw, begging her to come. It was March 28, 2022. Marta grabbed a small bag and boarded a train, thinking it would be for a week, maybe two.
Uliana didn’t want to leave Ukraine either. She was a philosophy major at a university in Kyiv, having “the time of her life,” she told me over coffee. She didn’t hear the first bombs. When she woke up on February 24, her phone was clogged with messages from family and friends. Then she heard the sirens. She remembers crying. She remembers sleeping in the middle of the living room on a mattress, far from the windows. The rest is a blur. Time was distorted: Days took months, weeks took days. It was her parents who forced her to leave for Poland. She remembers walking with her mother around Warsaw’s central train station, seeing hundreds of other refugees huddled on the floor. “So many people crying,” she said. Yet right next door, in an ultramodern glass building, was another world: Złote Tarasy shopping mall. Uliana recalled seeing people carrying posh shopping bags, and a girl sipping bubble tea without a care in the world. “It was so unreal,” she said.
The first time Sveta Udod called me, on March 10, 2022, I was coming out of a supermarket near my hometown in France. “We should make the border tomorrow,” she said. We had been texting for the past 24 hours, ever since a Ukrainian friend of mine asked if I knew someone in Poland who could accommodate a refugee family. My mother and my stepfather, who live 155 miles from the border, agreed. That’s how it worked back then—people calling, texting, instant messaging to find someone, anyone, who could take in their friend, their cousin, pick them up at the border, find them somewhere to stay. Overnight, the whole country seemed to turn into a giant refugee charity. When Sveta crossed the border, the first thing she saw was a Polish volunteer holding a sign: YOU ARE SAFE NOW. She started to cry.
Between February and May 2022, about 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees crossed into Poland, a country of 36 million. Most were middle-class women. Many came with only a few small, hastily packed bags. When I arrived in Warsaw in early March, just after the war started, I saw refugees everywhere: perched on their suitcases at train stations, crowded on the floor in hotel lobbies, with their children, their dogs. Ukrainian flags were everywhere, too: hanging from balconies, adorning people’s lapels.
By May 2022, over half a million Ukrainian refugees had been hosted in private Polish homes. At first it was spontaneous, unregulated, with little help from the Polish government. Anna Mazur used Facebook to invite Oksana Kovalenko, a mother with two young daughters, to move in with her. (Both asked to use pseudonyms because they feared backlash.) Two days later, Anna handed Oksana the keys to the house, the code to the alarm, and went off to work. “I wondered if I was insane, leaving a complete stranger alone in my house,” she told me. In places like Warsaw, 71 percent of Poles helped Ukrainian refugees. Most donated food or clothes, but as many as 24 percent volunteered at refugee centers. Money flowed. By the end of May, the aid from private donors amounted to about $2.6 billion. Some people gave away their own bedrooms to the newcomers, and slept on the couch instead. “It was just cosmic,” Tetiana Bulana, a refugee, told me.
No one seemed more surprised by all that outpouring of help than the Polish people themselves. It was, after all, still the same nation that had the 2016 Polish edition of Newsweek asking, “Is Poland the most racist country in the world?” In How the World Really Works, a 2022 book about the fundamental forces shaping modern civilization, Vaclav Smil wrote that mass immigration to Poland was unlikely to happen “in such an immigration-averse country.”
Before 2022, as much as 96 percent of Poland’s population identified as ethnically Polish. “Poland was unique in the European context,” said Małgorzata Kossowska, a social psychologist at Jagiellonian University. After World War II, the Communist government pushed for a “model of a country that was absolutely monocultural,” said Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska, a cultural psychologist at Ignatianum University, Krakow. The minorities—the Jews, the Germans, the Lemkos—were either forcibly displaced or persecuted. Growing up in a midsize Polish city in the 1980s and 1990s, I don’t recall ever seeing people who weren’t white.
When the wave of Ukrainian refugees arrived, Poland had no clear immigration policy. There were laws liberalizing access to the labor market, but not much on integration. In 2019, Poland’s Migrant Integration Policy Index score, or MIPEX, a tool that measures and compares immigration policies in over 50 countries, was a meager 41 out of 100, one of the lowest in Europe. (The United States stood at 73, Sweden at 86.)
While authorities were trying to figure out how to deal with the influx, ordinary people picked up the slack. Psychologists are still trying to understand what motivated Poles to give on such a scale. After all, just a year earlier, during the immigrant crisis on the Belarusian border, refugees coming from the Middle East and Central Asia did not experience anywhere near the same hospitality. While it may be tempting to point out that Ukrainians simply look much more like Poles, Kossowska believes the ethnic likeness is not enough to explain the sudden change of heart across society. Her research, based on surveys she’s conducted, points to a sense of common fate: If Russians had attacked Ukraine, it stood to reason that Poland might be next. It was “a basic fear that this is a kind of situation that could directly affect us,” she said. That fear made people think of Ukrainians as family, and behave toward them accordingly.
But you can’t give so much for so long and not burn out. “I was a bit tired,” Anna Mazur said. There were now always people in her house, kids running, yelling. Sometimes Anna just craved to plop on the couch with a cup of coffee, in peace, on her own. “We didn’t think it would last that long,” she said. She hosted Oksana and her family for three months.
“Inviting people to your home can be, paradoxically, counterproductive both for those offering aid and for those receiving it,” Kossowska said. You need proper training to help those suffering from war trauma. Refugees often behave very differently than do other people, she said. Many hosts expected smiles, gratitude, friendship, or at least “emotional reciprocity.” Instead, they saw their guests shut themselves in their bedrooms, distant and emotionally exhausted.
In August 2022, a report by WiseEuropa, a Warsaw think tank, warned of potential future tensions between Poles and Ukrainians. It warned that cultural similarity could be a trap, making people discount their differences and lulling them into thinking that integration should be a walk in the park. The report predicted conflicts over access to public services, be it health care or unemployment benefits. It called for policies and public campaigns to nip the problems in the bud. That didn’t happen.
Uliana felt the rising tensions in her own life. What helped her, at least to some extent, was boxing, which she used to relieve pent-up fear and anger. She had been particularly scared since Easter two years ago. She was walking with her boyfriend to a neighborhood store in Warsaw, late at night, when she noticed a couple arguing in a parked car. The moment she pointed them out to her boyfriend, the man got out of the vehicle and approached, saying something in angry Polish. When he realized they were Ukrainian, he started shouting at Uliana’s boyfriend: “Why are you here? Why aren’t you at the front line?” Then he punched him.
After that night, Uliana refused to speak Polish. Small jabs, like people rolling their eyes at her accent, pushed her deeper into her shell. She thought Poland hated her.
She was not exactly wrong. Forty-five percent of Poles are now against welcoming Ukrainian refugees, the highest level since the war broke out. More people say they dislike Ukrainians (38 percent) than like them (30 percent), down from the 51 percent who said they liked Ukrainians a mere two years earlier.
Katarina Melnyk, who is 28, felt the change personally. We met at Uniters Foundation in downtown Warsaw, where she works. She was wearing a soft pink top, but there was a hardened edge to her. All around us, cardboard boxes overflowed with Christmas gifts; the charity was preparing parcels for kids in Ukraine. In the room where we talked, a half-open camouflage backpack sat atop a table, tightly packed with medical supplies. Designed for the front line, it was one of many such bags that would ship out soon.
The place seemed peaceful, snow falling beyond the large windows that faced Warsaw’s main thoroughfare. Those very windows were smashed in twice last year, Katarina told me. For her, it was a sign of how things had changed in Poland. Another was the hateful slurs she gets when she speaks Ukrainian in public. “You are on the phone, and you hear: ‘Get the fuck out of here!’” It happened so often that she’d gotten used to it.
In early 2022, some experts were already warning about such a deterioration in attitudes. After all, certain seeds of the bad feeling between Poles and Ukrainians, such as the painful subject of the massacre at Volhynia, existed well before the war started. Indeed, you say “Volhynia” in front of Poles and Ukrainians and tensions rise immediately. Volhynia is a region of lush, rolling hills, dotted with picturesque lakes, on what is now the border between Poland and Ukraine. Before World War II, the western part of the region belonged to Poland; the rest was Soviet Ukraine. Early in the morning on February 9, 1943, Polish inhabitants of a small village, Parośla, were awakened by loud banging on doors. Outside, a large group of men had gathered, carrying axes and hatchets: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, an armed faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The massacre that followed left only 12 people alive.
From 1943 to 1945, according to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, members of the UPA brutally murdered between 80,000 and 120,000 ethnic Poles, including women and children, across Volhynia and surrounding areas. The reasons behind the massacre are still hotly disputed. The violence may have been intended to ethnically cleanse the territory for an independent Ukrainian state, as some Polish historians argue. The UPA may have been seeking revenge for the repressive policies of the Polish government, as well as Polish elites’ colonialist attitudes toward the Ukrainian population in the interwar period, or even going back as far as the sixteenth century—a theory more often advanced in Ukraine. As usual in history, things were not black and white. Some Ukrainians in Volhynia helped save thousands of their Polish neighbors (and some paid for that courage with their own lives). Some Poles revenge-killed thousands of Ukrainians.
Volhynia has long been a bone of contention between Poland and Ukraine. To complicate matters further, Ukraine had its own grievance against Poland: Operation Vistula, the 1947 forced resettlement of over 140,000 Ukrainians from southeastern Poland. Yet during the Soviet times, historical resentments were swept under the carpet. Poland and Ukraine were supposed to be brotherly Communist nations, and tricky history was not to be discussed. In the 1990s and early 2000s, after the Soviet Union fell and Ukraine gained full independence, the general spirit between the two countries was to forgive and move on, said Tomasz Stryjek, a historian specializing in Polish-Ukrainian relations at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. But after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the situation devolved. “It was the breakthrough moment,” Stryjek told me. Suddenly Volhynia, the UPA, and Stepan Bandera, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, were on everyone’s lips, from politicians to influencers on social media. It was the beginning of a “memory war” between Poland and Ukraine, Stryjek said, a war that only intensified after Ukrainian refugees settled in Poland.
Marta showed me a video on her phone. It was from her latest visit to Lviv. She was walking downtown when a convoy of military vehicles appeared, carrying the dead from the front line. “I started bawling, of course,” she said. The vehicles were adorned with red-and-black flags, a symbol of UPA. Passersby started to kneel. She kneeled, too.
In Poland, the red-and-black flag is controversial, to say the least, mainly because it brings to mind the bloodshed of Volhynia. When, in August 2025, young Ukrainians waved a huge red-and-black flag during a concert in Warsaw, it was perceived by many as a provocation. Several motions were filed with the prosecutor’s office to open an investigation into a possible violation of the criminal code—namely, the promotion of fascism. The prosecutor refused, ruling that the law had not been broken. That was in early September. By the end of the month, President Nawrocki submitted a draft bill to Parliament that would make it possible to punish “the promotion of Banderism.” The law is now under parliamentary review. If it passes, the red-and-black flags will be banned.
Yet for many Ukrainians, the flag is not simply about UPA and Volhynia. “It symbolizes the anti-Soviet resistance movement of the 1940s,” Stryjek said. In other words, it’s anti-Russian, not anti-Polish. Ukrainian museum workers once told Stryjek that, for them, the red-and-black flag is simply the yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag dipped in blood. He was floored. “That’s the end of the conversation, right?”
According to Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw, Ukrainians need such symbolism to fight the war—it unites them. “Those UPA symbols make Russians foam at the mouth,” she said. But for Poles, the flag reminded them of Volhynia, and the reminders still hurt.
In fall 2025, the “memory war” over Volhynia continued, with both sides trading inflammatory comments. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance posted articles on its website calling the massacre a genocide. It accused its Ukrainian equivalent of slowing down exhumations of burial sites and of “manipulating” public opinion. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, meanwhile, posted articles that blamed the massacre on the Soviets. Then came two developments that further complicated relations between Poles and Ukrainians and set social media ablaze: rail sabotage and a drone incursion.
On September 10, 2025, around 20 Russian drones swarmed across the country, forcing some airports to close. Uliana was certain that Russia would now invade Poland. She bought canned food and made plans for where to hide once the bombs started falling. Over half of Poles thought their country would soon be at war, up from a quarter before the incursion. Besides panic, fake news proliferated. On social media, Ukraine was often blamed for the attack. Ukraine’s goal, the story went, was to drag Poland into the war.
Barely two months later, in November 2025, Polish rail tracks and overhead power lines were damaged in several incidents, some with explosives, forcing trains to make emergency stops. Luckily, railway workers’ vigilance averted a tragedy. Yet this time, there was a twist: According to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the attacks had been carried out by two Ukrainians, albeit hired by Russian intelligence.
These developments did not help Polish-Ukrainian sentiment. “I can always tell when something has happened, even without watching the news, because people are suddenly less kind to me, more irritable,” said Julia Shatkovska, a Ukrainian living in Poland. However, there was an upside to the giant stir that the drones and the rail sabotage caused on social media: It allowed researchers to gauge the extent of disinformation spurred by the Kremlin. Across platforms, the number of anti-Ukrainian messages instantly shot up. After the Russian drones swarmed Polish airspace, 38 percent of social media comments that assigned blame pointed at Ukraine, and only 34 percent at Russia. “We can definitely say that Russia is waging an information war against us, a cognitive war,” Filip Bryjka, a political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, told me. “The scale of it is enormous.”
It’s not easy to estimate the amount of the fake news proliferating online that is part of the cognitive war, so you have to rely on a combination of methods, said Dariusz Jemielniak, a professor of management at Kozminski University. You can look up accounts that are purportedly based in Poland but in fact operate from Russia or Belarus. You can map connections between accounts to look for patterns of coordination (some accounts, for example, exist solely to share other accounts’ content, amplifying their reach). Sometimes you just get lucky, Jemielniak told me, and spot a stray Cyrillic character within a post.
The speed and ease of disinformation has been boosted by AI, Bryjka said. “Previously, a troll in a factory had to type everything in,” he explained. Now, that very same troll can copy articles into AI and have it rewrite dozens of versions of the same story. He can prompt AI to write in a way that stirs certain emotions or achieves specific outcomes. With AI, it’s also easier to test what might “bite,” Bryjka said: “They introduce various, often contradictory claims and observe the feedback—which content generates more interest, and which is then picked up and repeated by politicians and influencers.”
All this seems to be contributing to shifts in how Polish society feels about the Ukrainian refugees, although of course the role disinformation plays in such changes in sentiment would be extremely hard to measure, Jemielniak said. To complicate matters, disinformation doesn’t operate in a vacuum: The ground has to be fertile already. Russia is succeeding where the fake news “reinforces existing social tensions,” he said.
There are many such easily exploited tensions in the relations between Poles and Ukrainians. One is housing. Even before 2022, Poland was over two million apartments short. Add just under a million refugees, and it’s hardly surprising that rents shot up soon after the first bombs fell on Kyiv: by 14 percent in Warsaw and 16.5 percent in Krakow. For the refugees, the situation was particularly dire, as many landlords refused to rent to Ukrainians. One study found that calls would be disconnected at the first hint of an accent.
Vitaliia Dubrovska, a member of the boxing group, experienced housing struggles firsthand. “[The landlords] always told me: ‘OK, we’ll call you’—but no one ever did,” she said. When she finally found a place in Warsaw where the landlord was eager to sign, she didn’t think twice.
She was happy with the apartment until she met her neighbors, who complained about everything. They complained about her taking showers (the noise!) and about her two kids walking around (the noise!). Then they started making their own noise by banging on pipes. “Oh, Mother of God,” Vitaliia exclaimed. “I’m laughing now, but back then it wasn’t very funny.” One day, the man came over and tried to beat up Vitaliia with a broom. She filmed the scene and called the police. “I’m a human. No one has a right to treat me like that,” she said.
Health care is another thorny issue that turns Poles against Ukrainians. Poland offers nearly universal health care, but the system, hit hard by the pandemic, doesn’t compare well to European standards. Waitlists to see doctors are legendary. In 2022, Sweden and Germany had about 4.5 doctors per 1,000 inhabitants, while Poland had 3.5 (which is, admittedly, still ahead of the United States, where there were just 2.7). Health care spending per capita is among the lowest in the European Union, while mortality from treatable diseases is among the highest. Unsurprisingly, health care is where disinformation hits hard: “Ukrainians are given priority in hospitals!” Facebook and X posts decry. “There is no money for treating Poles—and yet Ukrainians get treated!”
The truth, however, is much different. By 2023, the number of doctors went significantly up, reaching 3.9 per 1,000 population—and the influx of over 5,000 Ukrainian physicians certainly helped. In terms of costs, Poland is on the winning side, too: While in 2024 it spent $0.63 billion treating Ukrainians, it cashed in over $1 billion in extra health care contributions. Many, like Uliana, simply prefer to go back home to get treatments—there are more than two dozen direct buses scheduled each day from Warsaw to Kyiv, and crossing the border is relatively straightforward. “It’s fast, it’s cheap, and I can understand everything they say,” she told me.
Contrary to what social media disinformation bots may claim—and what many politicians and influencers may repeat after them—calculations by Demagog, a fact-checking platform, show that, while Ukrainians living in Poland (both refugees and economic immigrants) receive about $1.1 billion in aid, they pay back into the budget almost $5 billion in taxes and social contributions. By 2024, 78 percent of Ukrainian refugees were working. According to a report by Deloitte, without them, the 2024 Polish GDP would have been 2.7 percent lower.
If anything, Poland desperately needs newcomers. With a fertility rate of 1.1, the country is among the fastest shrinking on Earth, its population dwindling far faster than China’s or Russia’s. By 2035, Poland, a country almost 10 times smaller than the United States, may be 2.1 million workers short.
Despite Poland’s obvious need for Ukrainian refugees, their future stands on shaky ground. Before special residency rights for Ukrainian refugees expired in early March, Zbigniew Bogucki, chief of the president’s office, said the change would mark “the end of ‘tourism from Ukraine’ at the expense of the Polish taxpayer.”
What happens next is still murky. When Izabela Zabielska showed me around the refugee housing facility she supervises, the Warsaw Family Assistance Center, the place smelled of a nursing home with a hint of wet dog. Some residents keep pets there, and it was snowing outside. The second-floor corridor was dark, narrow, and lined with wheelchairs. A six-year-old girl, carrying a board game that she’d fetched in the children’s playroom, stopped in front of her family’s door. “I think all of the Ukrainians are already here,” she told me in perfect Polish. Her mother opened the door to reveal a cramped room. An elderly woman, the girl’s grandmother, was slumped on the bed, a wheelchair at the side.
There were 170 refugees living at the facility, most of them disabled, elderly, or both. Since the special rights law expired, Zabielska said, many may end up homeless: “It seems like we will be just throwing these people out the door.” At the eleventh hour, the government decreed that disabled refugees and their caregivers may stay at the facility until next spring, but other refugees must leave by the end of June. Zabielska was worried in particular about single mothers with multiple children. She’d been hoping that the government would come up with an alternative solution at the last minute, but it didn’t happen. “At the last minute” seemed to be the pattern, she told me. When the special rights law was previously updated, her organization learned about the changes a week before they came into force. Zabielska shook her head: “What a nightmare.”
Uncertainty weighs heavily on many refugees. Will the war ever end? Would they go back if it did? Could they stay in Poland long-term? Research by Piotr Długosz, a sociologist at the University of the National Education Commission in Krakow, showed that a third of refugee women plan to go back to Ukraine once the fighting is over, and roughly the same number plan to stay in Poland for good.
There is also worry about loved ones back home. In her research, Kossowska found that, because of the loneliness and sense of helplessness it often brings, leaving one’s home country may be more difficult than staying. Compared to civilians in the war zone, Ukrainian refugees in Poland have more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and more anxiety over the risks of missile or drone attacks. Marta showed me her phone: On Facebook, there was one post after another about someone from her hometown who died on the front line. Even if you aren’t scrolling, she said, you hear the phone go ping: povitryana trivoga, air-raid alert. On Marta’s phone, the whole of Ukraine was marked in red, alerts all over the country. “You sit here, and it just keeps pinging.”
The refugee women’s mental health has gone downhill as the war has progressed. In Długosz’s 2024 survey, 58 percent of refugee women experienced high levels of stress, and 11 percent lived in deep anxiety. By 2025, those numbers were 80 percent and 22 percent. It’s not as surprising as it may seem, Długosz told me: “At first the body fights, then it adapts, and then … there’s exhaustion.” Marta inhaled through clenched teeth: “My God, this refugee experience is awful…. Even now I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
Yet psychologist Grzymała-Moszczyńska warns against treating refugee women simply as victims. She titled her 2024 study “Superhero in a Skirt” for a reason: It showed that, despite psychologists’ common focus on PTSD, such women show remarkable resilience. “They just have to be strong,” she said. Sasha Sidorenko compares it to boxing: You can’t just hide in the ring’s corner. “You need to take a step forward and confront things, meet the problems head-on,” she said.
If you treat refugees as victims instead of fighters, Grzymała-Moszczyńska said, you risk helping them in the wrong way. She has seen well-meaning aid organizations hand out proverbial fish instead of fishing rods. Ukrainian refugee women crave resources: practical tips on how to get jobs, how to secure language lessons, how to get to a boxing class.
If you view refugees as victims, you risk viewing them as people who drain your country’s resources instead of as contributors. You see them standing in line to go to the doctor, and you are blind to the refugee doctors on the other side of the door. “We need to publicize how much Poland gains from hosting refugees,” Grzymała-Moszczyńska said. “No one talks about that.”
If we really want to help Ukrainian refugees in Poland, she said, we should fight disinformation. For professor Jemielniak, allowing tech companies to propagate disinformation is like allowing factories to spout pollution into the environment. “It’s externalizing costs to society,” he said. We should be able to impose penalties for spreading this kind of harmful disinformation for the “very real damage such networks are doing,” he said.
Sometimes it’s the small acts of kindness that help the most. Uliana braved speaking Polish because of a Polish friend who kept encouraging her to try. “Isn’t it amazing how one person can make such a huge difference?” she said. “One person attacks you and does you wrong, and then you meet someone good, and that changes you again.”
Four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Uliana feels she is slowly “crawling out of the emotional hole” in which she used to hide. She has a new job, a new apartment, new friends. She goes to Warsaw’s posh shopping malls. Although the war is always on her mind, she said, “now I feel like I’m the girl with the bubble tea.”
Vitaliia used to talk constantly about her love for Kyiv—for Kyiv’s wide boulevards, Kyiv’s historic buildings. She used to be certain that she’d go back to Ukraine the moment the bombs stopped falling. Not anymore. “Previously, maybe 90 percent of me waited for all of this to be over,” she said. “Now 50 percent of me is still waiting, and the other 50 knows I have to do something, adapt to my life here.” She keeps boxing.
