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The number of nationality-motivated attacks in Poland is steadily increasing, according to data provided to the Polish press by the National Police Headquarters.
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This month has already seen widespread coverage of a vulgar attack on teenage girls from Ukraine on a municipal bus in Bielsko-Biała. An adult man verbally abused, threatened and insulted the girls for no other reason than that they were speaking Ukrainian.
And this is just one of 180 incidents that were reported to the police in the first half of 2026.
Alarming figures on attacks
Data shows that the scale of aggression against Ukrainians in Poland has risen sharply.
In 2024, Ukrainians living in Poland filed 267 reports of alleged hate crimes. In 2025, that number rose to 275. The 180 reports filed in the first half of 2026 already represent an increase of more than 30% compared with the same period last year, and nearly 35% compared with 2024.
Political blame game
Politicians are trading accusations over who is to blame for the rise in attacks.
Interior and Administration Minister Marcin Kierwiński wrote on X: “Kaczyński, Braun and Czarnek are doing a great deal to ensure that the brown wave spreads across Poland. The victims are both Poles and foreigners. I have a message for all those who have fallen in love with hatred: the police will always respond firmly. Zero tolerance!”.
Opposition Law and Justice (PiS) spokesperson Rafał Bochenek said that “Every form of violence and aggression, both physical and verbal, especially against vulnerable people, including children, should be unequivocally condemned and the perpetrators held to account.”
He argued that Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Interior and Administration Minister Marcin Kierwiński bear responsibility for such attacks: “Donald Tusk and Marcin Kierwiński have not only deliberately downplayed the rise in aggression on Polish streets so far, they are directly responsible for the brutalisation of public life in Poland”.
Polish-Ukrainian relations deteriorate
Ukrainian activist Natalia Panchenko, from the organisation Stand With Ukraine in Poland, sought to ease tensions between Ukrainians and Poles in a Facebook post following the case in which teenage Ukrainian girls were subjected to abusive comments on a municipal bus in Bielsko-Biała.
“The state is fighting xenophobia. Poland stands for the rule of law. Law enforcement agencies, the courts and the law operate here. That is why we should seek to hold the individual perpetrator to account, rather than projecting his actions onto an entire nation. I know many Poles who have been helping Ukraine for years. (…) Some idiot on a bus is not the whole of Poland. Just as any criminal among Ukrainians is not the whole of Ukraine,” she wrote.
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