Since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the country’s border with the EU, particularly that with Poland, has been in the limelight for reasons both good and bad. While in recent months it mainly attracted attention due to the Polish farmers and freight carriers’ blockade, the overall problems related to the Ukraine-EU border are far more complex and require a more comprehensive set of solutions.

When Polish President Andrzej Duda travelled to Kyiv at the height of Ukraine-Poland relations in May 2022, he talked mostly about Russia’s aggression and the need to enhance cooperation. But he also touched upon another, no less important matter. Namely, that Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine which caused a massive exodus of people during a short period exposed the Ukraine-Poland border’s subpar condition, adding that the border must “unite, not divide”. This statement was warmly greeted in Ukraine, as by then the border had turned into the country’s lifeline, with dozens of hubs created in bordering Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary to quickly process all sorts of critical supplies.

Alongside several of its neighbours, Poland recently celebrated a quarter of a century in NATO. Seen as a means of ensuring the country’s transition to democracy, membership of the Alliance has allowed Warsaw to become a key player in European security. Despite this, it is clear that real challenges lie ahead.

Poland has often been seen as a key supporter of EU and NATO enlargement. Having benefitted immensely from these processes itself, it has now backed enlargement to states like Ukraine, North Macedonia and Moldova. Despite this, there are certain peculiarities in its approach when it comes to each country.

In the digital age, with information flowing freely and narratives shaping perceptions, there is less and less hope of arriving at a point at which one objective truth prevails or even exists. This leaves us with the task of understanding discourses surrounding political events and processes. From that vantage point, one may look at the case of immigration to Poland and how it appeared in last year’s electoral campaign.

Poland’s new governing coalition has promised to restore the rule of law after many years of manipulation by its rival Law and Justice. Despite this, the changes made by the previous government have now plunged Poland into a battle between legality and legitimacy.

Ukraine has the second-largest HIV epidemic in Europe after Russia. Those refugees who fled the full-scale invasion to Poland with HIV have been forced to seek treatment and adjust to different approaches to the disease. In the end, the experience can provide lessons on how to better help those afflicted with the disease.

When Anna Aryabinska fled from Kyiv in March 2022 with her ex-partner’s children, she had little idea that she would end up supporting not only his family, but many HIV-positive Ukrainians in Poland. Until Russia’s full-scale invasion, Aryabinska had been an activist for the Ukrainian organisation Positive Women, supporting women with HIV. Now she is one of a group of volunteers assisting fellow Ukrainian refugees to keep taking medication for HIV, as well as integrate into healthcare systems in European countries which have very different epidemic profiles and standards of treatment.

The new Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has promised a liberalization of the country’s abortion laws, which are some of the most restrictive on the European continent. His path is a sharp contrast to the previous government’s anti-abortion crackdown. Yet, even as he commits to the issue publicly, the campaign he took to get there reveals that reproductive freedom in Poland remains an issue many lawmakers use only instrumentally.

Hot water, running over a pregnant belly, under beige and purple shower tiles. An orange cat, crawling through the litter box. Only a couple months after abortion doula Wiktoria Szymczak moved to Kraków from Warsaw in 2023, she was helping a stranger end a pregnancy in her apartment bathroom. Earlier in the day, Szymczak had got a call from a client who needed more help than anticipated, who we will call Agata to protect her privacy. Previously, Szymczak had told her how to pursue one of the few legal methods left for obtaining an abortion within the country. It is still legal to go online and order abortion pills for yourself in the mail through a dealer based outside Poland (Szymczak recommends medical non-profits like “Women Help Women”). Agata went online and she bought the pills to end her pregnancy.

For years, minority groups in Poland have been feeling pressure both from the government and society at large. Now with a new governing coalition, there appears to be potential breathing room for many of Poland’s minorities. However, that does not mean that the road ahead is clear or easily navigable.

Poland is often described as a homogenous state – white, Catholic and ethnically Polish. The numbers, at face value, support this idea. This apparent homogeneity is reinforced by the media. Often as a throwaway line when describing Poland’s demographics, or, for more insidious motivations, by those on the far right. This characterization, however, grossly simplifies the story of Poland and its citizenry. Historically, both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Second Polish Republic were heterogeneous states comprising a number of peoples, religions and languages.

The modern Polish nation was ultimately forged out of a union between former Poland-Lithuania’s nobility and Slavophone Catholic peasants. This process of creating ethnic Poles was anything but easy, with antisemitism often used as a means of overcoming the estate chasm between nobles and peasantry.

In 2021, thousands of people from the Middle East and North Africa crossed the Belarusian border into EU countries such as Poland. Polish activists who offered support say that emergency prepared them for the next refugee crisis, from Ukraine in 2022. While the Polish state’s approach dramatically shifted between the two situations, NGOs and volunteers leaned on the same skills and resources to help people on the move.

What makes Poles help Ukrainian refugees yet indifferent to the fate of migrants on the Belarusian border? Is this determined solely by the right-wing propaganda, which portrays the Ukrainians in good terms and those in Belarus in essentially bad ones?

The release of Agnieszka Holland’s film The Green Border (Zielona Granica), which depicts the human drama of people pushed across the Polish-Belarusian border and the helplessness of activists willing to help them – helplessness resulting from the specific political decisions of the Polish authorities – has been met with unprecedented heckling and brutal attacks in Poland. The outrage of the country’s highest-ranking politicians from the United Right coalition was clear.

Despite another win for Law and Justice, the three voting blocks of the democratic opposition are most likely to form a coalition government led by Donald Tusk.