The first five myths about Ukrainians in Poland — about pensions, the doctor’s queue, the labor market, benefits, and crime — we have already taken apart piece by piece. But the mythology didn’t stop there: it simply moved to another level — from money to identity. Now it’s not so much “Ukrainians are taking” as “Ukrainians are not who they claim to be”: they’re hiding from the war, covering up each other’s crimes, marrying not out of love but out of calculation. Each of these beliefs has the same structure as the previous five: a crumb of fact stripped of its context.
Let’s start with the harshest one.
Myth 1. All Ukrainian men in Poland are fleeing mobilization
The claim is so widespread that it almost needs no explanation: a working-age man with a Ukrainian passport in Poland is automatically “the one who fled.” This is a myth — because the vast majority of these men physically could not and cannot “flee mobilization” simply by being in Poland: no Polish institution has or ever had a mechanism to draft them into the army or hand them over to the Ukrainian armed forces, and most importantly — most Ukrainians in Poland arrived long before 2022, as ordinary labor migrants, not as refugees from the war. According to data from the Polish Development Fund, out of about 2.3 million Ukrainians staying in Poland at the end of 2022, 1.2–1.3 million — i.e., the majority — came to the country before 24 February 2022, often many years before the full-scale invasion. This is therefore not an exception but a basic fact: the typical Ukrainian in Poland is not a recent fugitive from mobilization, but a person who already had a Polish work history long before the issue of mobilization even arose.
As of mid-2026, the PESEL register in Poland listed more than 218 thousand men with UKR status aged 18–65. As “Nasz Wybir” explains plainly, despite reports that appear from time to time in Polish and Ukrainian media, today there is no mechanism that would allow a person staying abroad to be drafted into the army or extradited to Ukraine. The Ukrainian Freedom Legion — and that one is voluntary. The very construction of the myth is therefore wrong in two places right away: first in the input data — most of these people arrived not fleeing the war or mobilization, but long before them; second in the cause-and-effect logic — staying in Poland is neither a way nor proof of evasion, because there is nothing to evade here — the compulsory mechanism simply does not physically exist.
At the same time, part of this mythology has a rational kernel, only distorted. The number of applications for international protection filed by men of conscription age is indeed rising — from 580 in 2022 to nearly 3.9 thousand in 2024, and the Office for Foreigners states explicitly: fear of mobilization alone does not constitute grounds for obtaining refugee status. But these are a few thousand specific applications, not a description of 218 thousand men who have for years lived, worked, and paid taxes in Poland, often already before 2022.
It is also telling where the thesis itself comes from: an almost identically constructed fake-news story had already happened before — just about Poles. In December 2022, a post circulated online attributed to the deputy mayor of one of Warsaw’s districts: supposedly 70 thousand Poles had massively crossed the border with Germany, fleeing “forced mobilization” out of fear of a war with Russia. The Ministry of National Defence officially debunked this story as an absurd fake news of pro-Russian origin: no mobilization was announced in Poland at the time, and the Border Guard recorded no mass departures. It is the same scenario, word for word — “(a given nationality) is fleeing en masse from mobilization” — only redirected at a different audience. And the fact that the same fabricated structure had previously “worked” against Poles and is now being repeated against Ukrainians is proof that we are dealing with a ready-made disinformation template, not the result of real observation of the behavior of specific people.
Myth 2. Crimes committed by Ukrainians are covered up, while crimes against Ukrainians — on the contrary, are publicized
This thesis sounds almost like an axiom in some circles: when a crime is committed by a Ukrainian — people keep quiet about it, and when a Ukrainian becomes a victim — it immediately makes the front pages. This is a myth — and it is refuted in two directions at once: the real picture is not only different, but actually the opposite of what the myth claims in both of its halves.
Let’s start with the first half — “Ukrainians’ crimes are being concealed.” The fact-checking website Demagog states outright that it previously had to debunk exactly this claim — the assertion that violations of the law by Ukrainians were being kept quiet in the Polish media. The specific reason for this verification: a Facebook post was circulating with a long list of supposedly hushed-up “crimes committed by Ukrainians” — from the arson of a market hall in Warsaw, through blowing up railway tracks in Życzyn, to allegations of “undermining Poland’s territorial integrity.” The post, published by an assistant to one of the MPs, gathered nearly 10,000 reactions and almost 2,000 shares. Demagog verified each item on the list separately — and none was confirmed by the facts. The reality is the opposite: leading Polish media (rp.pl, Wirtualna Polska, Do Rzeczy, Kresy.pl) regularly and in detail publish police crime statistics involving Ukrainians — broken down by year, categories of offences, with specific numbers. This is not the behavior of media that are hiding something, but of media that systematically publicize the topic.
What’s more: the asymmetry, if it exists at all, works in the opposite direction. OKO.press documented an entire network of accounts — first reported by Demagog back in May 2026 — run from Vietnam that systematically spread made-up stories about alleged brutal crimes by Ukrainians. To appear credible, these accounts post real police photos, only captioned as completely different incidents. This is part of a documented Russian cognitive operation aimed at radicalizing Poles’ attitudes toward refugees. TVN24 cited a specific example: on July 20, 2026, a post appeared on X supposedly about a 52-year-old Ukrainian who for seven days tortured and raped a woman in Lesser Poland — with an attached police photo of the detained man in handcuffs. The post was viewed more than 120,000 times, drawing comments such as “they have hatred for Poles in their genes.” In reality, there was no such case — the photo concerned a completely different, unrelated arrest. The real problem, then, is not suppression but the opposite: an overproduction of false accusations that spread faster and more widely than any “cover-up” could stop them.
The second half of the thesis — “crimes against Ukrainians are being publicized” — also does not stand up to a comparison with the numbers. According to police data analyzed by rp.pl, in the first half of 2026 the police recorded 5,130 Ukrainian citizens as victims of a crime. Of these, hate crimes — i.e., motivated by nationality or origin, exactly what is supposedly being “publicized” — account for only 3.5% of all cases. The rest are ordinary frauds (the largest category: 1,151 cases in the first half of 2026 alone), thefts (nearly 800 cases in the same period — phones, wallets, documents, license plates), and common crimes that happen to Ukrainians just as often as to Poles, for the same banal reason: criminals do not care what nationality you are. Criminologist Prof. Brunon Hołyst explicitly emphasizes: the scale of Ukrainians’ victimization is not significant. So the media are not creating the impression of an “epidemic of hate” where it does not exist — on the contrary, both police statistics and publications based on them show that there are few real hate crimes.
“Recently we debunked the claim that media in Poland stayed quiet about lawbreaking by Ukrainians” — from a piece by the fact-checking portal Demagog, which has repeatedly verified this exact thesis and each time found it to be false.
Both halves of the myth are therefore wrong in opposite directions: crimes committed by Ukrainians are not being covered up — they are written about in detail and regularly, and the real problem is a stream of false accusations; crimes against Ukrainians are not being publicized — on the contrary, available statistics show that hate-motivated attacks are rare.
Why do myths change the topic but not the logic?
It is worth pausing here and asking the question directly: why over three years has the rhetoric shifted from “Ukrainians are taking money” to “Ukrainians are not who they claim to be, and even the media are playing unfair in their case”? The answer is simple: the first wave of myths crashed against specific ZUS and NFZ numbers, which are easy to verify. The second wave was deliberately chosen as harder to debunk — it concerns intentions, motives, and media bias rather than budget indicators, and that is why it lives longer.
Myth 3. The Ukrainian community in Poland glorifies the UPA and Bandera
This is the most sensitive of the new myths, because it touches on the real, documented Volhynian tragedy. It is framed not gently — not as “some Ukrainians do not know the context of the symbolism” — but sharply: as if Ukrainians en masse were “Banderites” precisely in the sense of supporting crimes against civilians, not in the sense of a symbol of the struggle for independence. So it is not about a flag or a song, but about an alleged approval of killings. This is a myth — and it is debunked not by denying that the symbolism appears at all (because it does in fact sometimes appear), but by directly verifying the very motive being attributed: is it really about supporting crimes, or about something entirely different.
Verification with numbers gives an unambiguous answer. A study by the Mieroszewski Centre, conducted in November 2025 among Ukrainians, showed: only 31% of respondents were well acquainted with the topic of the Volhynia tragedy, another 57% had heard something about it but were not sure of the details. This already contradicts the very construction of the myth: it is impossible to “support crimes” about which, in most cases, one has only a vague notion. Even more telling is another figure from the same study: 54% of Ukrainians supported the creation of a joint Ukrainian-Polish commission of historians to investigate these crimes — meaning that the majority neither denies nor justifies them, but wants to establish the truth through a joint, rather than one-sided, inquiry. This is the exact opposite of the “support for crimes” that the myth attributes.
The very mechanism of substitution was documented by the author of a piece in “Więź” — a Polish journalist who described his own experience: at a meeting to which Ukrainian friends invited him as thanks for helping them find an apartment, a black-and-red OUN-UPA flag appeared on the screen during the ceremonial part, and a patriotic song sounded from the speakers. The author describes this as a culture shock — not because those present wanted to offend anyone or make a political declaration, but because none of the participants simply realized the Polish context of that flag and of Bandera as a figure: for them it was solely symbolism of anti-Soviet resistance, with no connection whatsoever to the Volhynia tragedy. Where the myth sees conscious approval of the killing of Poles, in reality it is symbolism used without any knowledge of this specific context that gives it meaning in Poland. This is also confirmed by the scale: there is no organized, politically shaped support for the crimes as a mass phenomenon in Ukraine — no significant political force in the country bases its program on the ideology of OUN-B. In the 2019 presidential election, Ruslan Koshulynskyi — the candidate of a broad coalition of openly nationalist parties and movements (“Svoboda,” “Right Sector,” the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, the C14 organization) — won only 1.62% of the vote, i.e., he lost already in the first round. What the myth presents as mass support for crimes is therefore supported, statistically, by a negligible minority that could not even achieve a noticeable result in elections.
Historian Prof. Jan Pisuliński from the University of Rzeszów adds another argument against the myth itself: the vitality of this symbol in everyday Ukrainian life is based not on denying crimes against Poles, but on the fact that these units fought the occupiers the longest of all — the last members of the underground were captured only in 1960. The motivation for honoring them is therefore different from what the myth attributes. And one last detail that completes the debunking: as “Więź” notes, the very term “banderization” of Ukrainians in the Polish public sphere is most actively promoted not by Ukrainians themselves, but by Polish nationalist political forces — meaning the source of the myth’s spread lies not in Ukrainians’ behavior, but in Polish domestic politics.
Myth 4. Ukrainians themselves do not want to integrate; they keep to themselves
This myth works in the opposite direction to the previous ones: it does not accuse Ukrainians of taking excessive advantage of Poland, but of disregarding it — saying that they live alongside, but deliberately remain within their own closed circle. This is a myth — because research shows not reluctance but the opposite: Ukrainians display some of the highest rates of occupational and language integration among migrants in Europe, so the explanation “they don’t want to” contradicts the facts about them. And where social contact really is weaker, the cause lies on the Polish side of the equation, not the Ukrainian one.
The Institute of Political Critique study “We’re Not at Home” by Olena Babakova and Przemysław Sadura shows this clearly: Ukrainians in Poland are very well integrated into the labor market—they learn the language, work, pay taxes, and start businesses. PThe problem is that this economic integration has not translated into social integration: many of them, after several years of living in Poland, still do not have a single Polish friend. The key question, however, is why this happens. The study’s co-author Olena Babakova points to the cause directly, and it is not Ukrainians’ reluctance: the issue is not whether migrants themselves want to integrate, but that between society and migrants there is still the state—and it is precisely the state, in her view, that “turned out to be completely unprepared.” This concerns schools, offices, the residence legalization system, healthcare, and not migrants’ personal attitudes.
Even more concrete evidence for the reverse direction of causality is provided by a separate study by OKO.press on Ukrainian children in Polish schools: in schools, practices that are not integrative but assimilationist are occurring more and more often — for example, Ukrainian children are expected not to speak Ukrainian even outside of lessons, during breaks. Researchers also note the flip side of the coin: Polish students often do not want to sit with their Ukrainian classmates at the same desk, and teachers, despite good intentions, are not prepared to recognize the emotional state of a child with war experience or to resolve conflicts based on nationality — schools simply do not conduct anti-discrimination workshops, and conflicts are resolved only post factum. As a result, some children themselves avoid emphasizing their Ukrainian identity, “so as not to provoke Poles” — it is not Ukrainians who avoid contact with Poles, but the opposite: they adapt under external pressure so as not to lose that contact. This directly contradicts the logic of the myth: people who supposedly “do not want to” get closer are, in reality, actively trying not to stand out.
Myth 5. Ukrainian women marry Poles for documents and money
This stereotype is probably the oldest of the new five, and at the same time the most widely used in disinformation campaigns. It is a myth for two reasons at once. First, there is no factual basis—no study and no official statistic shows a mass practice of sham marriages for documents; there are only isolated anecdotes generalized into an image of an entire group of people. Second—and most importantly—the very rise in popularity of this claim has a documented artificial origin, and is not a reaction to any real change in the behavior of Ukrainian women.
A telling example was broken down into its component parts by OKO.press: in the autumn of 2022, a claim suddenly spread in the Polish information space “A Ukrainian woman stole [someone’s] husband”—with phrasings like that young Polish women are angry at Ukrainian women because they have a different career model, in which a woman’s social advancement is still more often provided by a relationship rather than independence. These claims had all the hallmarks of a coordinated, probably Russian, information operation, aimed precisely at young Polish women—a typical move: not a direct attack on Ukrainians as a group, but driving a wedge between specific social groups (in this case young women) through plain jealousy. This is a key fact for debunking the myth: hostility toward Ukrainian women as “homewreckers” did not arise from the grassroots, from Poles’ real observations, but was artificially triggered from outside—and therefore had no real demographic basis: Ipsos surveys then and later consistently showed a mostly positive attitude among Poles toward Ukrainians.
The reality described by the “Sestry” portal “Sestry”, using real mixed families as examples, is far more down-to-earth and debunks the myth already at the level of motivations, not just statistics. Maria Stanisławska came from Vinnytsia to Poland eleven years ago—to study nanotechnology at the Lodz University of Technology, not to look for a Polish husband; she met her future partner only years later, like most of the women featured—on a dating site. Couples mainly meet this way, build relationships over years, and see the main challenge not as “calculation,” but as overcoming the language and cultural barrier and the “mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law” stereotype, which—as Stanisławska says—they consciously break: “we show a different reality—we can laugh together, argue, but with love.” The number of Polish-Ukrainian marriages really is growing year by year—but this is evidence that people are increasingly living, working, and meeting alongside one another, not evidence that these marriages are fictitious, as the myth tries to claim.
Why are these two blocks of myths—about money and about identity—so easily taken as truth? Because both reduce a complex, long-term situation to one convenient sentence that doesn’t need to be checked in order to be believed. Social anthropology calls this mythological thinking: a belief based on faith, not on evidence. The only difference is that the financial myth shatters against a ZUS figure after one Google search, while the myth about a person’s motives and identity does not: because you can’t “verify someone else’s marriage” or “prove” that a particular person isn’t hiding from the war. That is why the second wave of myths is more resilient than the first—and why it is harder to fight it with facts.
Figures debunk myths. But debunking suspicion is harder than debunking a figure.
In this article, we analyze the most frequently repeated claims concerning Ukrainian citizens living in Poland. We compare each of them with the applicable regulations and the official data of public institutions. – Ed.
Source: Nowiny Wschodnie / RP.PL / OKO.press / TVN24 / Demagog.org.pl / Więź / Krytyka Polityczna / Sestry.eu / Centrum Mieroszewskiego (via ZN.UA) / Kresy.pl / UAinKrakow.pl
