Poland: Lifeline for Ukrainian refugees confronts donor fatigue and online abuse as anti-Ukrainian sentiment grows

Hours after Vladimir Putin announced his "special military operation" in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Russian troops began attacking Kyiv's Antonov Airport close to the home of Nastya Podorozhnya's family.

Nastya was 24 at the time and living in Krakow in neighboring Poland, having recently graduated from the city's Jagiellonian University.

Alarmed by the news from Ukraine and fearful of what was coming, Nastya rushed back to Ukraine two days before the invasion to be with her family and help her sister and her three children cross the border to safety in Poland.

Helping compatriots fleeing Ukraine

Nastya realized she could use her experience of living in Poland — how to get a doctor's appointment or simply buy a tram ticket — to help the flood of mostly women and children arriving in the country.

Poles were offering help and food at the border, but some people sought to take advantage of the vulnerable arrivals.

"I spoke to activists engaged in anti-human trafficking and they said what was happening at the border in the first weeks after the invasion was like Christmas, Easter and birthdays rolled into one for traffickers because people were so easily trusting the volunteers," Nastya told DW in a two-bedroom apartment in central Krakow her organization uses to provide shelter to vulnerable women refugees escaping domestic abuse or trafficking.

Hotline still fields 100 calls a months

Named Martynka, after Nastya's youngest niece, the organization also runs a hotline. It has received more than 5,000 requests for help since March 2022 and now gets about a hundred every month.

Her small team provides psychological and moral support in four languages as well as legal assistance and counselling.

"One of the very young women who lived with us for a long time was drugged by her boyfriend who she met as a teenager when she escaped the full-scale invasion and after years of relationship she found out that he has been drugging her and selling sex with her to other people" she said.

Nastya said she was motivated to help partly because of a traumatic experience of her own. While studying in Krakow, a Ukrainian man tried to rape her outside of her dormitory.

After a long and difficult legal process, during which police detained the suspect before releasing him, he was eventually found guilty of violating Nastya's bodily autonomy and given a restraining order.

"This terrible, traumatic experience not only gave me horrible PTSD, which later on sort of helped me be empathetic and understand survivors with PTSD, but also it put me through the system of justice and how survivors are being treated," she added.

Aid cuts and donor fatigue

Since 2022, around 100 women and children have found shelter in the apartment. Her team's work relies largely on donations from international organizations.

But cuts to USAID have led to increased competition for grants, while donor fatigue has forced the team to cut its one-to-one therapy sessions.

"Ukraine is not in the headlines anymore," says Nastya. "The international attention has moved elsewhere. For all of summer 2026 we have been running a very challenging fundraising campaign. It is so hard to convince people to donate to a Ukrainian organization right now. There is something called exhaustion, donor exhaustion, fundraising exhaustion."

The UNHCR's acting representative for Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, Jun Shirato, confirmed the difficult situation in the aid sector.

Speaking to DW in Warsaw, she said that funding cuts last year have forced UNHCR to scale back its staff in Poland by two thirds from 120 at its peak in the months after the invasion to 40 now. The UNHCR has now closed three of its regional offices opened in Krakow, Lublin and Rzeszow after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Its sole remaining office in Poland is in Warsaw.

Changing attitudes to Ukrainians

Nastya's fundraising efforts increasingly meet with online abuse, too.

Attitudes toward Ukrainians in Poland have changed. In the months after the invasion, many Poles opened their homes to refugees, including Nastya's sister and her daughters.

The situation is now very different. Earlier this year, new rules restricting access to child benefits and free healthcare for refugees who don't work were introduced.

In the first half of this year, reports of hate crimes committed against Ukrainians in Poland rose by a third according to Polish Police statistics.

Historical disputes fuel tension

At the same time, historical disputes between Poland and Ukraine, have resurfaced, fueling further hostility toward the Ukrainian community, which accounts for more than three quarters of all foreigners living in Poland.

In May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's decision to name a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which took part in the murder of tens of thousands of Poles during the Second World War, triggered outrage in Poland.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of Poland's highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle.

While Poles focus on the UPA's massacre of Polish citizens, many Ukrainians view the UPA and nationalist leaders like Stepan Bandera as heroes because they fought against the Soviet occupation after the war.

"This week we are supporting a family of Ukrainians whose car was completely destroyed. No windows left in the car and with spray paint someone wrote 'Bandera people go back where you came from,'" said Nastya, adding, "I think it is so devastating and I've recorded a video about it. We have hundreds of comments there, of people wishing me death, wishing me to go back where I came from. It is very tough emotionally."

Animosity stoked by Russian bots

Nastya said the hostility is also driven by Russia using online bots to stoke tensions between Poles and Ukrainians.

"They do not want us to be together, or to remember who our common enemy is. They don't want Ukrainian refugees to integrate or feel welcome," she said.

Despite the strain, Nastya remains optimistic that she and her team can continue their work.

"For some reason I am — and this is the weirdest thing. I love my job so much. I want to do this beautiful thing. I would easily send my mother, my sister, my best friend to Martynka for support. I know there are few organizations that could provide such wonderful help."