Now, Russian disinformation fuels the memory of violent historic conflicts, and Polish empathy is burning out
Originally published on Global Voices
Folkowisko during the “Borderland Memory” project, bringing Ukrainian and Polish youth together to preserve shared historical heritage, restore historic cemeteries, and strengthen cross-cultural friendship. Photo: Folkowisko. Used with permission.
Marcin Piotrowski remembers the beginning of his work in Ukraine through the Budomierz-Hruszów border crossing in February 2022, days after the launch of Russia’s war on Ukraine. “We crossed the border on the second day after the full-scale invasion,” he says, “and there were hundreds of people there. Nobody was helping them.”
People were waiting for days to enter Poland, some in cars and some on foot, as temperatures fell to around minus 15 degrees Celsius. On the Polish side, food and transport had been organised, but the queues on the Ukrainian side had become a challenge of their own. Piotrowski and volunteers from his Polish association, Folkowisko, decided to intervene. “We had experience because our association organises festivals,” he explains. “We put up tents, brought volunteers, and our medical service from the festival came as well. Later, we started helping at other border crossings, then in Lviv at the railway station, and we began working with volunteers from different parts of Ukraine.”
What began as emergency assistance developed into a network of projects across the Polish-Ukrainian border. Folkowisko helped establish a medical clinic and education centre in Nakhachiv, near the Polish border, where Polish and Ukrainian cultural workers have held joint workshops. The organisation has also supported psychological care, trained Ukrainian psychologists and social workers, and brought Ukrainian families affected by the war to Poland for temporary respite.
But Folkowisko's work is not only about the present. Piotrowski is also interested in the history of the border region, and in what happens when difficult memories are discussed through contact rather than isolation. “Before the Second World War, there were more than a thousand Ukrainians in the village where we work,” he says, referring to a locality in what is now eastern Poland. “Today, there are 43 people and they are all Polish. People were resettled in 1945 and 1947, during Operation Vistula. This was a place where Jews, Poles and Ukrainians lived together, and 80 years ago you could not really say where the border was.”
The history separating the two societies is particularly painful. During World War II, tens of thousands of Polish civilians were killed by Ukrainian nationalist formations in the Volhynia region. Polish nationalist groups retaliated, killing thousands of Ukrainian civilians. The competing memories of these events have remained politically sensitive, especially in families whose relatives were victims.
After the fall of communism, the history of Volhynia became increasingly prominent in Polish public debate. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) acquired an important place in national memory because of its role in the struggle for Ukrainian independence against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Disputes over monuments, commemorations, exhumations and historical figures have repeatedly affected relations between Warsaw and Kyiv.
The subject is also vulnerable to manipulation, according to Łukasz Wojtkowski, an assistant professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, who researches information operations and disinformation. He argues that historical grievances can be connected to contemporary fears and used to deepen divisions: “Volhynia is a playbook for propaganda and disguised disinformation,” he explains. “It is basically the only open case between those two nations that can spark the engine of disinformation and hatred. Russia can put two irons in the fire at the same time: it can increase the hatred between Poland and Ukraine, and it can reinforce the Russian narrative that there is a fascist regime in Kyiv.”
Anna Mierzyńska, a Polish journalist and social media researcher specialising in disinformation, has studied similar narratives targeting Polish audiences. “Reliable historical debate,” she stresses, “is always based on listening to both sides and taking new developments into account. Its purpose is not to attack or create hatred, but to explain what happened and find an understanding.” While there is such a debate among historians and experts, she adds that in the Polish information sphere, “many of the posts on this subject are designed to provoke hatred toward Ukrainians.”
Recurring narratives portray Ukrainians as a physical threat to Poles, Mierzyńska continues, using descriptions of the Volhynia crimes to create fear, or to suggest that Ukrainians could seek Polish territory. Existing social problems can also be folded into the same narrative. Long waiting lists for healthcare, for example, existed before the arrival of millions of Ukrainian refugees, but online claims blamed Ukrainians for them. Housing, employment and public services have been framed in similar ways.
The scale of Ukrainian displacement makes the relationship especially important. In 2026, nearly a million Ukrainians took temporary protection in Poland, representing 21.8 percent of all people from Ukraine under temporary protection in the European Union.
We need good contacts between Poles and Ukrainians, integration, getting to know each other and building trust. When we know each other well and trust each other, outside influence becomes much less important. – Anna Mierzyńska
For Piotrowski, the first months after the invasion demonstrated what such contact can look like. “Ordinary citizens living on the border with Ukraine were the first ones to provide immediate support,” he recalls. “I have never seen so much kindness in my life on both sides of the border, and so much reconciliation and understanding.”
Five years into the full-scale war, however, the border has also revealed the limits of that extraordinary solidarity. “I understand that when Poles opened their homes, it could become difficult,” Piotrowski says. “Someone comes who speaks another language, has slightly different customs and wants to stay for a long time. This is what I call empathy burnout.”
He does not regard that exhaustion as proof that the solidarity of 2022 was false, but rather, as a relationship being tested by time. His response is the same one that drives Folkowisko’s cultural work: more contact. “Poles don't know Ukrainians, Ukrainians don't know Poles,” he says. “Our job is to make people meet each other and understand each other.”
This approach means bringing difficult history into conversations in much the same way that Folkowisko’s festivals and programmes bring Polish and Ukrainian participants together while addressing the violence and displacement that transformed the region.
Wojtkowski is more cautious about whether historical reconciliation alone could resolve the wider conflict over competing narratives. “Imagine that tomorrow Poland and Ukraine commemorate every victim, Ukraine admits who was killed and how many people died, Poland admits what happened on its side, and all the exhumations are completed,” he posits. “It would not change everything, because Russia has other narratives.”
He maintains that, when it comes to history, both Polish and Ukrainian society did not do their homework properly. “In Poland, we learned the story of the interwar period as the restoration of the Polish state after more than a hundred years without independence,” he says, “but we did not always learn enough about the Ukrainian experience within that state. Ukraine has its own work to do in confronting everything that happened during the Second World War.”
Wojtkowski further advises that both Poland and Ukraine “should step very carefully, as if on very thin ice.” According to him, there should be signs of goodwill and a willingness to cooperate, but there is still a lot to do politically, academically and socially.
For Piotrowski, however, governments and historians do not have to resolve everything before ordinary people can build relationships: “We are trying to connect people who live ten or 15 kilometres from each other. They have different memories, different histories, but they can still meet and work together.”
As Ukraine moves toward the European Union, and as Polish and Ukrainian lives become increasingly intertwined, those everyday relationships may shape how the two societies handle their shared past. “If we lose the contact between ordinary people across both countries,” Piotrowski maintains, “then it becomes much easier to build the walls. And once the walls are there, it is much harder to build the bridges again.”
You can listen to an audio version of this story here.
Nata Yasevych is a multimedia producer, media maker, and journalist, covering social issues and politics.