Although the news came like a thunderbolt, it is likely that the timing of the announcement was carefully planned.
On Monday, just a day after Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day, Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, announced that he intended to veto the Ukraine Aid Law put forward by the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The purpose of the bill was to extend to March 2026 social welfare payments such as child benefit to Ukrainian refugees in Poland. The current system expires at the end of September.
Ever since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, about one million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring Poland. Most of them are women and children.
The president’s veto puts Donald Tusk’s government in a bind: It now has to come up with a solution to ensure that hundreds of thousands of refugees are not without legal status on October 1.
Benefits only for refugees in employment?
“[Child benefit] 800Plus should only be paid to those Ukrainians who have a job in Poland,” Nawrocki told the press in Warsaw, adding that Ukrainians were already at an advantage in the Polish healthcare system because they receive treatment regardless of whether they work and pay health insurance.
“This puts us in a situation in which Polish citizens, in their own country, are less well treated than our Ukrainian guests. I don’t agree with that,” said the president, before repeating his election campaign slogan “Poland first, Poles first.”
‘Public opinion has changed’ — Nawrocki
Nawrocki says that both the financial situation and political and public opinion in Poland have changed fundamentally over the past three-and-a-half years, which means that the policy has to be changed.
The president went on to say that support for Ukraine in the conflict with Russia remains Poland’s “strategic and geopolitical goal” and announced that he would put forward his own bill on the matter.
Nawrocki also indicated that the requirements for naturalization should be tightened, and punishment for illegal entry into the country should be increased.
“Nawrocki has shown his anti-Ukrainian face,” wrote the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on Tuesday. In doing so, wrote Roman Imielski, the president wanted to demonstrate his proximity to anti-Ukrainian nationalists.
Remembering the Volhynia massacre
Nawrocki, who holds a PhD in history, also proposed that symbols of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was led by Stepan Bandera, and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) should be treated in the same way as Nazi and Communist symbols and banned by law.
In 1943, the UPA waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish population in Volhynia, a region that had belonged to Poland before the Second World War and was occupied by Nazi Germany after it attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.
It is estimated that about 100,000 Poles were killed.
Bandera is celebrated in Ukraine as a hero for his resistance to the Sovietization of the country. In Poland, he is held responsible for the massacre, which Poland has declared a genocide.
The end of Starlink in Ukraine?
Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Digitalization Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski warned that the president’s veto also put the funding of the Starlink service for Ukraine at risk.
Poland finances the provision of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications service to Ukraine to the tune of €43 million ($50 million) per year. The extension of the law until 2026 would have secured a continuation of this funding, too.
“With his decision, he [the president] has de facto shut down the internet in Ukraine,” said Gawkowski.
“I can’t think of a better gift for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s troops than cutting Ukraine off from the internet,” the minister posted on X.
Ukrainians’ contribution to Poland’s economic boom
“Karol Nawrocki has overturned the entire system [of aid for Ukrainians],” wrote Boguslaw Chrabota in the daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita. “This can have devastating impacts on the labor market for thousands of Polish companies and for relations with our neighbors. We could well lose hundreds of thousands of employees,” he wrote.
A report compiled by the state-owned National Development Bank (BGK) says that child benefits for Ukrainian families cost the state 2.8 billion zloty (about €600 million), while the taxes and social security contributions paid by Ukrainians amount to 15.1 billion zloty (about €3.5 billion).
Thanks to the Ukrainians, Poland’s gross domestic product (GDP) has increased by between 0.5% and 2.4% annually.
Attitudes to refugees have hardened
Despite these economic benefits, the attitude towards Ukrainian refugees has tipped three-and-a-half years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to a survey conducted by the Mieroszewski Center in late 2024, 51% of those surveyed consider the social welfare benefits paid to Ukrainians to be too high; only 5% feel they are too low. A research group at the University of Warsaw announced in February that 96% of those surveyed wanted financial assistance for refugees to be restricted.
President versus prime minister
Nawrocki was inaugurated as president on August 6. He is now turning the office of president, where members of the right-wing conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party call the shots, into an alternative center of power.
His aim is to weaken Donald Tusk’s government as much as possible, thereby paving the way for PIS’s return to power — probably with the extreme right-wing, libertarian Confederation Liberty and Independence party — in 2027.
European delegation to Trump without Poland
The stand-off between Poland’s government and president has also started to impact the country’s foreign policy, where the Polish president’s role is clearly defined in the constitution.
Before a delegation of European heads of state and government and high-level representatives of the EU accompanied Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on August 18, Nawrocki’s staff intervened and contacted the American government.
They insisted that President Nawrocki and not Prime Minister Tusk should attend the meeting. The upshot of the dispute was that Poland was not part of the European delegation at all.
Nawrocki now intends to travel to Washington on September 3. His first international trip as president will, of course, be to meet his role model, Donald Trump.
This article was originally published in German.
