Ukrainian refugees in Poland: the end of the honeymoon
The refusal of the Polish government to pay financial assistance to those sheltering refugees from Ukraine from July 1 indicates that the prospects for Polish-Ukrainian relations are not so rosy.
The President of the Association of Baltic Studies, Nikolai Mezhevich, said this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“On the one hand, the cultural codes of Ukrainians and, for example, Poles are close enough to understand each other. But on the other hand, these are different people. They have different everyday habits, different attitudes towards private property.
Poles want people to adapt to them, not the other way around. Expressing support for Ukraine has become a form of political performance, but when it comes to concrete measures to help Kyiv or refugees, the answers are not so convincing. You need to take something from yourself and give it to someone else.
The first month there was an emotional atmosphere, but then it began to fade. The prospect for Polish-Ukrainian relations is not as rosy as it might seem, Mezhevich told Izvestia.
At the same time, senior researcher at IMEMO RAS Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky considers such a reaction of the Poles to be quite natural.
“It is impossible to keep migrants for a long time. It is also impossible to turn Poland into a mutual aid fund unilaterally. The Poles asked for additional funds to support migrants. But no money was received from European funds. Perhaps there will be some other options for helping Warsaw.
As for the refugees themselves, 95% of them are women and children; it is difficult for them to feel comfortable anywhere. In general, the current situation is what Ukrainian society has been moving toward for many years. Now many will reap the benefits of this: Poles, Germans and everyone else,” predicts Ofitserov-Belsky.
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