Attitude of Poles Towards Refugees in the Context of the War in Ukraine

Abstract

Escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 caused a migration of refugees, the scale of which was the largest in Europe since the end of World War II. The biggest number of refugees crossed the border with Poland and received huge, spontaneous, and comprehensive support and assistance from Poles. It is remarkable that this reaction was fundamentally different from the previous declarations of Poles about accepting immigrants and granting them refugee status. The article aims to indicate the factors which influenced the attitudes of Poles towards refugees from Ukraine and forms of support provided to them. The adopted research hypothesis assumes that the attitude of Poles to receiving refugees from Ukraine was influenced by: making the threat to Poland’s security more realistic as a result of the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine to a full-scale war; positive perception of refugees from Ukraine as people in need of support and culturally close, whose presence does not threaten the safety of Polish society. In order to verify the hypothesis, the following research methods were used: descriptive method, stagnant data analysis, comparative method, and statistical method.