Poland expels 11 over Russian-backed anti-Ukraine agitation among refugees
Poland expelled nine Ukrainians and two Belarusians as its security service tied Russian money to a months-long effort to pull refugees into anti-Kyiv agitation.
Poland has expelled nine Ukrainians and two Belarusians after its Internal Security Agency said the group used Russian money to recruit Ukrainian refugees for demonstrations against the government in Kyiv. The agency said the operation had been active since autumn 2025 and was designed to pull refugees in Poland into political agitation gradually, using slogans and local grievances rather than a single overt flashpoint.
The case fits a wider Polish view of Russia’s pressure campaign as hybrid warfare, not isolated meddling. Warsaw has spent years accusing Moscow and Belarus of sabotage, espionage, cyberattacks and disinformation, and the agency’s own 2024-2025 activity report listed those threats alongside terrorism as its main multidimensional concerns. Polish authorities have also detained multiple people over suspected ties to Russian intelligence, reinforcing the message that security services see influence operations, covert recruitment and public disorder as connected fronts in the same conflict.
The choice of target is also telling. Ukraine’s refugees in Poland are a large, politically exposed population: UNHCR said 966,023 people from Ukraine had active temporary-protection registration in Poland as of March 10, 2026, and a separate UNHCR fact sheet put the number of refugees present in February at more than one million, about 2.5% of Poland’s population. Many are women and children, far from home, living under legal and economic pressure, and already vulnerable to messages built around corruption, fatigue and anger over the war.
That vulnerability has sharpened as Poland has adjusted parts of its support regime. The European Commission said the Polish government drafted an official act to phase out measures introduced in 2022 for people displaced from Ukraine, and UNHCR’s legal update said Poland’s special support rules changed again on March 4, 2026. Those shifts make refugee communities easier to unsettle and easier for hostile actors to frame as abandoned or politically useful.
The broader backdrop is the scale of displacement Poland has absorbed since Russia’s full-scale invasion. A Polish government report said the war triggered the largest refugee migration in Europe since World War II, with 3.05 million Ukrainian border crossings into Poland recorded from January 1 to March 31, 2022. Polish official material says the country remains among the main hosts for refugees from Ukraine in absolute terms, which makes it a central arena for any campaign that aims to turn migration, grievance and wartime exhaustion into leverage against Kyiv and its backers.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
