Number of Poles who have negative attitude towards Ukrainians and are against providing military aid to Ukraine has increased - poll
Over the past year, the number of people in Poland who oppose military aid to Ukraine has increased from 26% to 35%. The number of Poles who have a negative attitude toward Ukrainians has also increased.
According to Censor.NET, citing European Pravda, this is evidenced by the results of a study conducted by the sociological laboratory ARC Rynek i Opinia commissioned by the Meroshevskyi Center.
At the same time, the number of supporters of military aid has decreased by 5 percentage points over the year, to 49%.
Thus, less than half of Poles support the provision of military assistance to Ukraine.
Also, over the past year, the number of Poles who have a negative attitude toward Ukrainians has increased from 27% to 30%, while the share of those who have a positive attitude has decreased from 25% to 23%.
However, age-related changes in attitudes toward Ukrainians are the most alarming.
While in the group of middle-aged and older people over 45 years old, a positive opinion of Ukrainians still prevails over a negative one, among young people it is the other way around: only 16% have a good attitude, while 37% have a bad one.
"While the older generation of Poles, in particular among the intelligentsia, still often perceives the Ukrainian people as a brother or sister with whom they grew up together, then quarreled over their allegedly bad political elections, and now live with them as a neighbor (who needs help in times of poverty or in case of a Russian attack), younger generations are much more likely to perceive Ukraine as a foreign country," the Meroshevskyi Center explains.
Poles also feel tired of the presence of a large, at least one and a half million Ukrainian community in Poland.
The number of supporters of the policy of assimilation of Ukrainians in Poland has increased by 6 percentage points, from 14% to 20%, meaning that this group wants the children of Ukrainian refugees to actually become Poles.
At the same time, only 14% of Poles want Ukrainian refugees to stay in Poland.
Instead, more than half of the respondents would like them to return to Ukraine.
