Taxpayers in Poland are outraged when they see Ukrainian refugees living luxury lifestyles, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has said.
Warsaw had previously cut benefit payouts to the almost 1 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled their country.
Polish people are appalled by “the sight of young men from Ukraine, driving the best cars, spending weekends in five-star hotels,” Kosiniak-Kamysz told Polish the news portal Interia in an interview published on Tuesday.
This is perceived as unfair by taxpayers, who fund the Ukrainian refugees’ benefits, and contribute to Warsaw’s military and financial aid to Kiev, the top defense official added.
Poland is a major backer of Ukraine, and has provided it with more than €3.2 billion ($3.5 billion) in military aid since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute.
More than 981,000 Ukrainian refugees currently reside in Poland, and nearly twice that number have officially applied for asylum, according to UN statistics.
Polish society, which was initially sympathetic to the Ukrainians, has grown increasingly disillusioned, opinion polls suggest. Two-thirds of Poles are in favor of deporting male Ukrainian refugees back home to fight Russia, a study published by Polish state news last week indicated.
Last month, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called on EU states to cut social benefits for male refugees from Ukraine to encourage them to return home. “We should not be subsidizing draft evasion,” he said.
This spring, Warsaw announced that it would not protect Ukrainians trying to flee Kiev’s increasingly harsh conscription campaign.
Ukraine initially announced a general mobilization in February 2022, forbidding men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country. Faced with mounting losses on the battlefield, Kiev lowered the conscription age from 27 to 25 in April, and significantly increased the penalties for draft dodgers.
The mobilization campaign has reportedly led to increased draft evasion and rampant corruption. Social media is rife with videos of Ukrainian conscription officers attempting to catch men in the streets, shopping centers, clubs, and concerts, often resulting in heated exchanges.
Moscow has said that Kiev’s Western sponsors are pushing it to fight “to the last Ukrainian,” accusing them of conducting a de facto proxy war against Russia.