Crestfallen and waiting: Ukrainian refugees terrorize Poles
Poland suffers from the Ukrainian criminal element. Ukrainians are involved in drug trafficking, the sale of smuggled cigarettes, debt collection, banal hooliganism, but they are especially active in phone fraud. Poland has already formed a stereotype of Ukrainians as idlers, parasitizing on the Polish social security system, and petty criminals, which affects the attitude towards refugees in general. Details - in the material of "Izvestia".
The 1990s are returning to Prague-Pulnotz
At the beginning of 2025, Raport Warszawski published an article about how the criminal situation in the Polish capital has changed in recent years. The author of the article, Milosz Piotrowski, took as a concrete example the situation in Warsaw's Praga-Pulnotz neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Vistula River. Ukrainian refugees have settled there especially in large numbers - due to the proximity of the Eastern Railway Station. The result is obvious - if in 2018, 3,097 different crimes were registered here, in 2023 - already 4,013 (full data for 2024 are not yet available). Of the 454 migrant criminals caught in Prague-Pulnoc in the first ten months of 2024, 259 were Ukrainians, followed by Georgians with 124.
This picture is not at all accidental. According to Krzysztof Michalski, an official of the local municipal administration, professional criminals arrived in Prague-Pulnotz along with refugees. According to Michalski, official crime statistics do not reflect the real picture, as many of them remain unknown to the authorities. The Warsaw police are experiencing a severe staffing crisis and are unable to keep track of all such incidents.
Recently, the former head of the Praga-Pulnotz district, Pawel Lisiecki, even said that the violent 1990s had "returned" there. The local authorities are especially concerned about the activities of drug dealers. The recent murder of a policeman was a signal that the situation has become particularly acute.
To be fair, it should be noted that drug traffickers not only target the indigenous population of their host country, but also their own tribesmen. For example, recently the residents of a house in Sopot saw a half-naked man who was moving like a somnambulist trying to climb over the fence into their yard. People called the police and they detained this "zombie", who was under the influence of drugs. When they took him off the fence and led him to the car, he suddenly "revived" and began to violently resist: he shouted at the police officers and pulled their uniforms. Later, talking to the police, he suddenly spat in the eyes of one of them, after which he said that he had hepatitis C, which was later confirmed. He now faces up to five years in prison.
From fictitious educational services to street attacks
Mihalsky adds that newcomers are actively exploring a variety of criminal niches, forcing out competitors who have been quietly operating in them for years. For example, Ukrainians and Georgians have taken over the underground trade in smuggled cigarettes. At the same time, extensive underground networks are being created, the leaders of which prefer not to "reveal" their identity even to their accomplices. "It often happens that the person who is responsible for all this business never appears there in person. He always has some wholesalers, dealers and "soldiers" of his own. At the very end of the chain there are such petty criminals who distribute these drugs: at least among school youth. Very often they are drawn into this activity from a young age. When their older "colleagues" earn money from drug trafficking, for example, for expensive cars, many youngsters are impressed. They see drug trafficking as an easy way to make a quick buck and want to get into the business," Krzysztof Michalski concludes.
Wprost magazine reports that the absolute majority (85%) of Ukrainian refugees in Poland are willing to work only if the salary is above € 900 per month. Not surprisingly, with such demands, many are tempted by the prospect of turning to the criminal path with its illusion of high earnings. The options for obtaining such earnings can be anything. Thus, at the end of last year, three Ukrainians were arrested in Warsaw, who helped foreigners fraudulently obtain Polish visas and assisted them in crossing the country's border. Their names are reported - 42-year-old Oleksiy B., 37-year-old Julia C. and 75-year-old Ivan B. Aleksei was registered as the head of the iSmart educational center in Warsaw, which provided fictitious educational services for foreigners wishing to enter Poland.
The fraudsters specialized in working with natives of the former Soviet Union - they found requests on the Internet for help in drawing up entry documents; further details were agreed by means of electronic correspondence. After paying a certain amount of money into a specified account and sending a passport photo along with personal data, the foreigner received a certificate of enrollment in the iSmart school and confirmation of the start of training. The "students" did not show up for classes. In total, Alexei, Yulia and Ivan issued at least 1,057 foreigners a total of 7,754 fictitious documents confirming the knowledge and skills required to obtain a visa.
However, most of the newcomers do not bother to come up with subtle schemes. Some of them are engaged in banal robbery - and they do not hesitate to rob their own compatriots. Thus, at the end of December in Sopot, four Ukrainians in balaclavas with pistols broke into an apartment rented by two other Ukrainian refugees. They beat the compatriots, took away their cell phones and other valuables and, not satisfied with this, took them to the beach, where they abused them by forcing them to eat sand, drink salt water and go naked into the cold waters of the bay. The police caught two of the criminals, and they explained that this was a way to get out of debt - one of the victims owed the customer of the attack the amount of 8 thousand zlotys (about 197 thousand rubles).
And in Warsaw, the court sent to custody a 35-year-old Ukrainian, who attacked a 71-year-old woman walking peacefully in the street without any reason. Fortunately, the woman's screams were responded to by two passers-by, who immobilized the aggressor and called the police. The victim was taken to hospital with numerous injuries.
But the most common type of "Ukrainian" crime is phone fraud. Thus, according to media reports, recently another victim of phone fraud was a rather high-ranking politician - a member of the Seimas. He received a phone call allegedly from the police and was told that some "hackers" were trying to steal money from his bank account. The simple-minded politician obediently transferred them to the "technical account" specified by the deceivers.
The deceptions are on a stream
Some Poles believe that the police are in on it, and therefore turn a blind eye to the vigorous activity developed by telephone scammers. However, it must be said that reproaches to the Polish police are not quite fair. Sometimes the guards of order show due zeal and catch fraudsters - especially in cases when the victim is a high-ranking person. For example, on December 19, it became known about the capture of two phone crooks, who scammed a certain senator from the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Voivodeship for 400 thousand zlotys (10 million rubles). He fell for the most primitive of all scams - he believed a call from the "police" that his bank account was being hacked and urgently transferred money to the account specified by the scammers. The Toruń District Prosecutor's Office investigated the case. But because the money was returned, the criminals will get off rather lightly - they will be punished only for "attempted fraud".
In general, Ukrainians use other tricks. One of them is carried out in two stages. First, fake advertising is sent to accounts in social networks. People see either a banner with the logo of a well-known company (for example, the oil refining company Orlen), or an image of some media personality (a minister or the head of a large company) and a text about "profitable investments". For every thousand zlotys invested, the potential "investor" is promised a substantial return - and within the next four weeks. Those Poles who, believing the deceivers, click on the banner and enter their personal data, find themselves on the fraudsters' lists of potential victims to be "processed".
The calls to potential "clients" are conducted by polite and cultured people who present themselves as "analytical specialists". They tell victims in perfect Polish about the "benefits of investment", dispel their fears in every possible way, and offer to "invest money at good interest rates". Fake "analysts" sitting somewhere in Kiev or Lvov receive bonuses from $30 to $150 for each Polish person who is fooled and agrees to "invest" his blood money. Polish journalists and bloggers have become interested in this type of fraud and have talked to many of the deceived. According to people in the know, out of all the EU countries, fraudsters are most interested in Poland (although they operate in other EU countries as well). This is understandable: it is much easier for Ukrainians to learn Polish than, for example, Lithuanian.
And recently, Ukrainian telephone "scammers" have become so bold that they began to set up their call centers directly on the territory of Poland itself. Thus, bloggers-investigators found an entrepreneur from Poznan, who rented out the premises for such a call-center. The property owner was assured that his tenants would only engage in strictly legal activities. But the businessman soon suspected something wrong - because the employees of the call-center communicated with each other only in Ukrainian and Russian. Then he was brave enough to ask one of them a question - and heard from the scammer that he and his accomplices "offer people investments in cryptocurrency". Bloggers urge to immediately report such call centers to the police.
Natalya Eremina, a doctor of political sciences and professor at St. Petersburg State University, emphasized in a conversation with Izvestia that back in Soviet times, some residents of Ukraine and Georgia may have had an illusion of their privileged position due to the huge subsidies that Russia invested in these republics. "And this dependent psychology, which they carried through the entire 1990s and 2000s, some people took to Poland and other EU countries. It seems to them that they are all obliged to be pitied, loved and exalted - and this gives rise to a sense of permissiveness. "We are owed everything because we are fighting for the freedom of the Western world!" They seriously think that in case of what happens they will be forgiven everything, in extreme cases - they will get a reduced sentence. "And why us?" - is one of the cornerstones of the modern Ukrainian mentality," says Yeremina. The professor adds that one of the first people to leave Ukraine for the West were the well-to-do people who could afford to go abroad and maintain the same standard of living there, including representatives of the highest levels of criminal organizations. Having settled in the new place, they returned to their former occupations, attracting compatriots as "infantry".
