When the man heard Oleksandra Iwaniuk speaking Ukrainian with a friend on a crowded tram in Warsaw, he launched into a tirade of verbal abuse. Bald and wearing military camouflage, he addressed his slurs in Polish to the whole carriage, never making eye contact with the two women.
“Everybody could hear him, but the most striking thing to me was that nobody reacted,” recalled Iwaniuk, 39, an academic who has lived in the Polish capital for 15 years, long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “I realized that I didn’t have courage to address him myself because it really felt like there could be physical violence.”
With anger at immigration being stoked up across Europe, it’s the kind of attack that could have happened in many places. But the incident exposes the shift in a country whose economy has boomed with the help of Ukrainian labor and is the main conduit for Western aid to the Kyiv government’s war effort.
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