A Polish man stood up for a Ukrainian teenager, and three men beat him for it. The 60-year-old intervened when three men shouted abuse at a Ukrainian teenager on a tram in Poznań, and they turned their aggression on him, beating him so badly that he suffered a memory blackout, Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita reported.

The attack fits a documented and worsening pattern of anti-Ukrainian violence in Poland. Hate crimes rose more than 30% between 2024 and 2025, Poland's Deputy Interior Minister Czesław Mroczek said.

It is the second such assault to surface in days: on 11 July, a man in Łódź beat a passerby he had mistaken for a Ukrainian.

Incident escalated at tram stop 

According to Poznań police spokesman Andrzej Borowiak, the beating happened on Friday, and the man came to the police on Saturday evening, accompanied by his wife, who had been caring for him after the incident.

It began on the tram, where he witnessed three men hurling insults at a Ukrainian teenager and stepped in. The attackers redirected their aggression onto him. At a stop on Kurpiński Street, a confrontation broke out and escalated into a beating.

Police are working from tram and stop cameras

Police questioned witnesses and seized footage from the surveillance cameras at the tram stop, with recordings from inside the tram due to be released on Monday. Identifying the attackers is ongoing.

That the aggressors turned so readily from the Ukrainian teenager to the Pole defending him is its own signal about how the hostility works: once "defender of Ukrainians" becomes a category worth attacking, the violence no longer needs a Ukrainian target to find one.

The hostility is measured, and it is rising

Earlier, Poland's own General Staff has reported large-scale Russian operations aimed at fracturing Polish-Ukrainian ties, and anti-Ukrainian messaging in Poland's information space doubled between August and November 2025 compared with a year earlier. In June 2026, Poland arrested eleven people over Russian-funded paid protests staged among Ukrainian refugees.

Polish public support for taking in Ukrainian refugees has fallen from 94% in March 2022 to 48% by early 2026.

Poland remains the main hub for weapons reaching Ukraine, and breaking the two nations apart has been a Russian objective since 2022.