This project was initially meant to be a narrowly specialized experiment — an attempt to measure the level of hidden and overt discrimination against Ukrainian refugees in Poland’s private rental housing market. However, as we worked through the data, it became clear that apartment doors closed to a Ukrainian accent, exhausting “castings,” extraordinary financial deposits, and “passive discrimination” are only a superficial symptom of much deeper pathologies. Barriers in the real estate market turned out not to be an isolated market aberration, but a sensitive barometer that registered the symptoms of a deep, multi-level crisis in relations between two societies and states.
Poland is still far from outright hostility toward Ukrainians. However, political and information tension between the two countries also seeps into everyday matters. Most sharply — into the search for an apartment.
At one point Anna felt real fear. Not for herself — for her loved ones. She is 21, studies for a master’s degree in Warsaw, and has been living in Poland since 2022, when she fled the war. Anna took part in the “Hate Observatory” project (run by the Alians 24/08 Foundation, chaired by the author of this text): she monitored ethnically motivated physical attacks and hate speech against Ukrainians on Polish-language channels on the Telegram messenger. Such cases, she says, are far more numerous than what reaches the public sphere.
When the project began to be talked about publicly, the team became the target of attacks by right-wing Polish politicians. “At that moment I was truly afraid for safety — not so much my own as the safety of my loved ones.”
Another source of anxiety comes from everyday conversations. Polish peers began to openly use arguments that were “verbatim quotes from Russian narratives or statements by politicians spreading anti-Ukrainian theses.”
She also has the feeling that her own state does not hear her. “Leaving the territory, but remaining a citizen of Ukraine, you cease to be within the sphere of interest of your own state. That is, it’s as if you were crossed off from the state’s interests and left to yourself in a foreign country,” says Anna. Decisions made by Kyiv, in her view, do not take into account the experiences of Ukrainians abroad, and sometimes even worsen their situation. Because of this, even the thought of returning home provokes fear: once again you will have to adapt, this time in a divided society.
Anna’s story does not prove that “Poles hate Ukrainians”: the experts we spoke with warn precisely against drawing such a conclusion. It does, however, show the informational and political environment in which people seeking safety, work, and a roof over their heads in Poland live.
Noise louder than the facts
Daryna Sydorenko, director of research at the Kyiv-based Transatlantic Dialogue Center and senior adviser at the Alliance 24/08 Foundation, gives a telling example. During a large-scale check by the Polish police, around 2,000 people were inspected, and among those who committed misdemeanors Polish citizens predominated. Yet the headlines of leading Polish media focused on 90 detained Ukrainians. Another example — the state broadcaster TVP, which actively reported on isolated grenade explosions in Ukrainian cities, building an image of a country with an “uncontrolled circulation of weapons”. “Some of these headlines in fact overlap with the narratives of Russian propaganda” — says Sydorenko: the media likely reproduce them without realizing it themselves. The reason, in her view, is simple — “a very intense fight for likes, clicks and subscriptions”.
Ukrainian media are not blameless either, says migration researcher and journalist Olena Babakova: they write about Poland “with neophyte zeal,” cherry-pick the most radical statements by individual politicians or neighborhood quarrels, almost not noticing grassroots solidarity.
The result can be seen in the numbers. According to CBOS data, in March 2022 accepting Ukrainian refugees was supported by 94% of Poles; in July 2026 — 42%, with 52% opposed. At the same time, 82% of respondents are ready to accept a Ukrainian as a neighbor, and 83% as a co-worker (10 and 8 percentage points less than in 2023). Distance has grown, but the door has not been slammed shut.
Facts lose out to manipulation, says Marharyta Sytnyk, co-founder of the “Holka” initiative and leader of the “Bridges of Ukraine” initiative. She points in particular to six main disinformation frames about Ukrainians — “a burden on the budget,” “dodging service,” “ungrateful,” “Banderites,” “job thieves,” “criminals” — which, through repetition on anonymous Telegram channels and in bot farms, made their way into the mainstream. Meanwhile, according to a Deloitte study for UNHCR, Ukrainian refugees in 2025 generated about 2.4% of Poland’s GDP (on the order of PLN 94 billion), and the employment rate among them rose to 76%.
Conceptual frames become everyday reality. Blogger Karyna Filonenko (Casya_krk), who herself came to Kraków as a refugee, tells of a Ukrainian woman with a child who, during a children’s outdoor game in a park, was told by a Pole that the participation stamp was “for Poles only”, and of her pregnant friend who in Warsaw was publicly insulted simply because she replied to her mother in Ukrainian. Under information about crimes, in her observation, dozens of identical anti-Ukrainian comments appear — “polished, purely technical work of bot farms”. This is her own assessment, not the result of a separate study. Orysia Kharytoniuk, PhD in political science and an independent researcher of Polish-Ukrainian relations, also warns against the other extreme: the notion of “total hatred” she calls “a shaped image of Russian propaganda”.
Finally, between the two countries—according to Sydorenko—“there is a lack of a permanent socio-political bridge”. When uncertainty arose around the “special law,” as Babakova reports, within three to four weeks Ukrainians with PESEL UKR status submitted hundreds of thousands of applications for residence cards. In turn, the Ukrainian embassy, in her view, is constantly trying to “smooth over and sugarcoat” negative experiences, which makes part of the community feel slighted. Social psychologist and PhD candidate Patryk Kukła from SWPS University adds that demeaning language lowers people’s willingness to empathize and help, and that politicians deliberately use it during election campaigns. He says there is a lack of joint Polish-Ukrainian research into these mechanisms. Kharytoniuk describes Kyiv’s approach to diplomacy with Warsaw in one word: “I would call it chaos”. In her view, specialists who understand the Polish context are being systematically pushed away from decision-making, and their absence leads to diplomatic mistakes and emotional escalation. She also describes mutual blindness: “Polish public institutions want to understand Ukraine from their own perspective, knowing us poorly, and Ukrainian institutions want to understand Poland from their own perspective, also knowing it poorly”.
Closing doors
When employees of the “Ukrainian House” in Warsaw call Polish apartment owners and immediately say they are looking for a place for a Ukrainian family, they hear—as Svitlana Maslii recounts—a polite: “No, only Polish families”. Svitlana, a housing and psychological support specialist at the Foundation, has been helping people in housing crises for more than four years. In the past, searching for an apartment could take a week or two; now—as she says—at least a month.
Ihor Lisin, vice president of the “Ukraine” Foundation in Wrocław, notes that discrimination rarely takes the form of an open insult: after hearing an accent, landlords most often “simply hang up the phone”. Sometimes the words strike with their blunt honesty. One owner told him: “I’d rather rent to other migrants, even Arabs, than to Ukrainians” because of his negative experiences. Lisin also describes double standards: if a Pole damaged an apartment, it’s treated as an individual case, but if it was a Ukrainian — the blame is shifted onto the whole nation.
On top of that, there is the price of housing. “To rent even a studio, you need 6,000 zlotys, and to earn 6,000 zlotys, you have to work for more than a month and not eat anything” — says Maslii. In 2026, the number of places in collective accommodation centers is decreasing, the rules of state support are changing, and the team in her department has shrunk from 19 to two people, while cases are becoming increasingly difficult. For older people, people with disabilities, the seriously ill, or families with children, the lack of housing can mean returning to Ukraine, including to frontline areas.
Karyna Filonenko knows the taste of rejection from her own experience. In spring 2022, after arriving in Kraków, due to repeated refusals her family lived for six months in temporary centers/hotels for refugees in Muszyna and Krynica-Zdrój. Anna, in turn, watching the apartment search from the sidelines, notes that Ukrainians were required to provide more confirmations: people, as she says, “had to prove it, present more evidence that they are creditworthy”, while a candidate from Western Europe, in her view, has to put in “much less effort”.
But not every refusal is discrimination, and it is worth distinguishing the two. Owners fear evicting debtors, which is why some insist on an occasional lease agreement. It simplifies eviction, but requires the tenant to indicate another premises they can move to, as well as the consent of its owner. For Ukrainians who arrived because of the war, there was a facilitation without the need to have such an address. However, besides this, there are other barriers—requirements to confirm income, bank statements, the need to have a guarantor, sometimes a deposit for several months in advance (amounts as high as 24 thousand zlotys appeared)—as well as “castings,” when the owner invites several candidates to a viewing at the same time. In themselves, such requirements do not prove prejudice: similar conditions may also be imposed on Poles. One can speak of discrimination when there is a direct refusal due to citizenship or different treatment of candidates in the same circumstances.
Experiment: five cities, two questions
After talking with experts, we decided to check the situation firsthand through a small experiment. In June, we conducted telephone interviews using the “mystery client” method (mystery calling). All calls were made by a person with a distinct eastern accent, calling listings for studio apartments for rent on the OLX portal. Listings were selected from the first page of search results; we did not call real estate agency listings and excluded those that already had a translation into English, Ukrainian, or Russian — the presence of a translation indicates an initial openness to foreigners. Studio apartments were chosen after consultations with experts, who indicated that discrimination is less noticeable when renting rooms.
Ultimately, in June we managed to conduct 48 phone calls regarding listings in Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdańsk, Rzeszów and Cieszyn. During the calls, two identical questions were asked: whether the owner rents the apartment to foreigners and, if so, whether only on the basis of an occasional lease. The sample is not large, and the experiment was designed to reveal primarily discrimination against foreign tenants, not exclusively Ukrainians. However, most landlords we spoke with asked to уточify the nationality — the caller introduced herself as a young Ukrainian refugee who is studying. This experiment shows differences in the situation between cities, but it is not a representative measurement of the market, and due to the small sample its results cannot be read as a comprehensive ranking of discrimination. It does, however, help to identify specific barriers and behavioral patterns, rather than their overall scale.
In Gdańsk, the highest number of outright refusals was recorded, as well as the nearly obligatory use of an occasional lease. At the same time, among the 13 phone calls made there, the responses varied: there were owners who claimed that foreigners had lived with them for six years. One owner initially refused, explaining that he did not know foreign languages, but when he heard that the tenant was “from Ukraine,” he said that “there is no problem at all, because it’s a similar culture and behavior”. Another landlady replied: “I hadn’t thought about it, but if you are a calm person, have a steady income, and are ready to rent long-term, then why not?”.
In Warsaw, particular attention was paid to the tenant’s financial situation and “social profile.” Only in one of the 14 conversations conducted in the capital did we hear a categorical and outright refusal — already at the stage of the first question, the answer was: “I prefer people with Polish citizenship”. Another owner stated that he rents to foreigners, but “it depends on what kind of foreigner it is”, because he had problems with the previous tenant.
In Wrocław, among eight conversations there were no open refusals due to nationality; instead, owners asked about income, legal status of stay, and the terms of the agreement. There were also listings with a note that they were looking for tenants “regardless of skin color, orientation, or nationality”.
We were also interested in looking at the situation in smaller border towns to see whether there is a difference in attitudes toward refugees depending on the number of residents in a given locality and its proximity to the border with Ukraine. In Rzeszów, located close to the Ukrainian border, out of eight conversations the responses were mostly neutral or positive, although there was one outright refusal. It was explained with the words: “the rental was only for Poles and I would like it to stay that way”. In turn, in Cieszyn, located on the Polish-Czech border, in the 5 interviews conducted no open discrimination was observed, but landlords often emphasized the tenant’s legal status in the country.
These observations can be compared with a University of Warsaw study conducted in 2024 by Sara Bojarczuk and Barbara Jancewicz. The researchers contacted landlords in Warsaw on behalf of applicants from Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, and Nigeria (a total of 1,155 contacts) by phone and text messages. Polish applicants were more likely to be able to arrange a viewing of the apartment: 65.6% successful contacts compared with less than 40% for Ukrainians and Turks and 26.7% for Nigerians. The mode of contact did not affect this difference. As Jancewicz said, “it did not affect the level of discrimination — it remained the same”. The study concerned Warsaw only.
People who face refusal due to their origin are advised by experts to document such cases and, if possible, seek legal assistance. At the same time, refusal alone does not yet prove discrimination: what matters are the specific circumstances and whether the same requirements are applied to different candidates.
A sideways look: Italy
A researcher at the Migration Policy Group, Bașak Yavçan, points to a shortcoming: temporary protection status is defined by an expected return, not by the actual place of residence, and “four years of work, school and paying taxes don’t add up to anything permanent”. However, the barriers in Poland differ from those in other EU countries, including Italy. In Poland, which announces extensions of status in advance and introduced CUKR, the main filter has become the housing market. In Italy, by contrast, as ECRE researcher Viktoriia Vaitovych says, EU decisions to extend protection are transposed with delays, causing people to temporarily lose access to health insurance and social housing. There, the “gatekeeper” is municipal registration (residenza): a Ukrainian mediator at Caritas, Valeriia, says that civil registry offices and banks do not accept a paper certificate instead of the plastic card, which takes 3–4 months to arrive, and without registration and an employment contract you cannot open an account. A good heart alone is not enough. Anżelika from Kharkiv sublets a room informally, without a contract, and for this reason cannot obtain an ID document. In turn, the son of Olena, who has been living in Italy for 18 years, after a year of unsuccessful apartment hunting left for Germany: “In Germany, if you have an employment contract, you find an apartment right away.”
The paradox of this story is that what is missing most is not loud reforms, but predictability. Olena Babakova reminds us that for years the rules for Ukrainians in Poland were patched up with short extensions of the “special act,” and each time people lined up for new documents. A long, transparent procedure from PESEL UKR to a residence card would not only relieve the provincial offices. It would give a person what is hard to sign a lease without: the certainty that in six months they will still have the right to live here, and a document they can show the landlord.
The harder part, however, is an honest and pragmatic conversation between the two states. Daryna Sydorenko advises Kyiv to move out of the mode of reacting to every statement from Warsaw and to propose its own agenda. Orysia Kharytoniuk calls for allowing experts on Polish issues into decision-making, who currently—as she puts it—are “invisible” to the authorities, and believes that the core of the relationship should remain shared security: in the face of the threat from Russia, it is precisely that, in her view, that can overshadow historical and economic disputes. Patryk Kukła points out that there is a lack of joint Polish-Ukrainian research on dehumanization, and Babakova appeals to the media, when reporting on discrimination, not to forget about Polish NGOs and local governments that help every day.
None of these steps will solve everything. But together they could change something that is hard to measure in numbers—a sense that you live between two states, neither of which hears you.
Anna knows that feeling. And yet, despite all the difficulties, she does not plan to leave Poland. She stays, thereby reminding us that what depends on whether this country can be made a bit more welcoming for people like her is not abstract “relations,” but the lives of ordinary people.
This article was produced with the support of Journalismfund Europe in cooperation with Marta Abba (Italy) and Sofia Nazarenko (Ukraine).
President of the Management Board of the “Ukrainian Youth Alliance ‘24 August’ (24/08)” Foundation and coordinator of the “Hate Observatory” project. A PhD candidate in Political Science and Public Administration at SWPS University, where he researches the impact of conspiracy narratives on national security policy. Programme Director of SWPS PL LAB.
Since 2023, he has worked as an analyst with Detector Media, a leading Ukrainian media research organisation. He holds two master’s degrees: one in Journalism and Social Communication from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), and another in Interdisciplinary European Studies from the College of Europe in Natolin.
He is an expert at the Polish Robert Schuman Foundation, with which he conducts training sessions for school students in smaller Polish towns on countering disinformation about the European Union.
He is the author of numerous analyses, articles, media commentaries and academic publications focusing on Russian disinformation in Europe and North America, as well as US politics.
In 2023, during an internship at the Parliament of Canada, he contributed to the development of parliamentary motion M-102, “Countering disinformation in Canada and around the world”.
He is a recipient of the Young Diplomat Award 2023 and received a distinction at Young Experts Day 2025 for his research on Russian disinformation. He is a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the WestBalkanNet youth network.
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