Ukrainians in the three EU countries that have taken in the largest numbers of Ukrainian refugees are increasingly facing aggression — from insults on public transport to knife attacks. Journalists at the Kyiv Independent analyzed tens of thousands of posts on X and found that the same narratives circulating online
Warsaw police have arrested a man suspected of stabbing two Ukrainians on a bus over their nationality, police said. A court ordered him held in custody, and the charges he faces carry long prison terms.
Russia's full-scale war drove nearly a million Ukrainians to seek protection in Poland, and attacks on them for their nationality grew this year. Polish police received 180 reports of hate crimes against Ukrainians in the first half of 2026, over 30% more than a year earlier.
The attack took place on a Warsaw city bus in mid-October. The attacker stabbed and slashed two passengers, both Ukrainian citizens, and fled before police arrived. Both victims went to hospital with multiple stab and cut wounds. Police found that he attacked them because of their nationality.
Officers quickly identified the suspect but spent days locating him. The 30-year-old was hiding and living in a forest in Warsaw's northern Bielany district, where police detained him last weekend.
He faces three charges. Two concern the bus attack: attempting to cause grievous bodily harm, and causing injuries lasting more than seven days. The third covers threats against another man at a Warsaw venue in August 2024.
Police said he acted as a repeat offender, within five years of serving a prison term for a similar crime. The charges carry three to 20 years in prison. At prosecutors' request, a court ordered him held for three months.
In early August, Ukraine's ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, said anti-Ukrainian remarks and attacks had risen by about 30%. Days later, people rallied in 22 Polish cities against violence toward Ukrainians and other minorities.
Other recent cases this year include:
Tensions rose again in late September, when a Ukrainian man allegedly killed a priest in a knife attack at a monastery in Jarosław. Bodnar said some Polish politicians and journalists used it to argue for deporting Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, police in southwestern Poland detained a Russian citizen suspected of spying, after catching him photographing trains and railway infrastructure. Russia's suspected sabotage campaign keeps reaching Poland and the rest of Europe, and Ukraine's intelligence warned last week that Russia may stage sabotage in Eastern Europe and try to pin it on Kyiv.
Russian analysts can locate Ukrainian weapons plants from details in published photos and TV footage, Ukrainian defense outlet Oboronka reported on 29 October. Open-source researchers told the outlet how to hide those details.
Ukraine plans to build 7 million drones this year, and Russia is hunting the plants that make them. In June, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said Russia’s GRU military intelligence was gathering data to prepare air strikes on defense plants and attacks on their engineers.
On 7 April 2022, Ukrainian channel 1+1 aired a report from a workshop at the Kyiv Armored Plant converting captured Russian military equipment for Ukraine’s forces. On 14 April, Rybar, an anonymous pro-Russian Telegram channel, posted the factory’s location. Russian missiles hit the workshop on 16 April, killing at least three civilians, the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) found.
Retracing the likely method, CIR wrote that wall colors, window size, and ceiling height could single out the plant, and Google Earth imagery the workshop. InformNapalm researcher Andrii Lisitsyn told Oboronka that matching a frame with old photos, satellite images, job ads, or staff profiles quickly narrows the search.
A Gaussian blur smears pixels but keeps part of the information, Oboronka wrote. In a 2020 blog post, aerospace engineering student Gonçalo Raposo showed it can be fully reversed if the exact filter and edge handling are known. Pixelation fails too: a 2022 neural network reconstructs plausible faces from pixelated images. Lisitsyn advises cropping or fully opaque masking instead, plus checking file metadata.
Some Ukrainian defense enterprises still keep accounts and procurement records in Russian 1C software, Oboronka wrote. Since 6 January 2026, 1C products have been on the State Special Communications Service’s list of banned software. The ban covers systems with state information resources and critical information infrastructure owned or managed by state bodies, state enterprises, and local governments, the service said.
Oboronka also wrote that days before the full-scale invasion, Spanish journalist Pablo González photographed production lines at engine maker Motor Sich. Poland held him from February 2022 until a prisoner swap sent him to Russia in August 2024. Prosecutors then indicted him under both his names, Pablo González and Pavel Rubtsov, for spying for Russian military intelligence.
I moved to Poland from London with my Polish husband, and we are raising our two-year-old son here. My son will grow up and live his entire life within the digital infrastructure that the government is building today. The fact that I was not born in Poland does not mean I don’t care about its future, as a mother, I have an obligation to fight for my son’s rights as a Polish citizen.
Recently, I saw that the Polish Ministry of National Defence has signed a Letter of Intent with the American analytics company Palantir Technologies.
Having lived through what happened in the United Kingdom when our government signed similar agreements, I believe that Polish people deserve to know what happens when public systems are handed over to a foreign defence contractor.
Among the company’s founding investors was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.
In London, I was part of a campaign group fighting against Palantir’s contract with our National Health Service (NHS).
Under that agreement, the US defence contractor gained deep access to NHS data systems, including mental health records, reproductive health data, and medication history.
Over 100 pages of the contract remain heavily redacted and hidden from the public. Because Palantir is an American corporation, citizens cannot easily hold them to account or use basic data access requests in the way they could with an EU-based company.
In the UK, two parliamentary committees and the British Medical Association are calling on the government to exit the contract before the break clause in 2027.
Poland is not the first European country Palantir has approached, but other allied nations have already drawn the line.
In Switzerland, the Swiss armed forces rejected Palantir’s offers nine times. The military’s conclusion was that it was technically impossible to guarantee that sensitive national data would not reach American intelligence services.
When a Swiss investigative outlet reported on this, Palantir sued them and lost on 22 of 23 counts. In Germany, the Bundeswehr explicitly excluded Palantir from a military cloud procurement on grounds of data sovereignty, with senior military officials stating that granting external industry employees’ access to the national database was completely unacceptable.
Poland is now preparing to deepen its cooperation with a company that the Swiss and German militaries both rejected on security and sovereignty grounds.
It is our children who will have to face the long-term consequences of today’s decisions. I have seen what happens when people in the United Kingdom did not ask questions until it was too late, and I cannot stay silent and watch exactly the same thing happen in Poland.
If you care about data sovereignty, public transparency, and protecting the next generation, join us at the public protest against Palantir’s contracts in Poland, organised by Nasze Dane, on 8 November at Plac Konstytucji in Warsaw at 3pm.
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