Polish-based Ukrainian aid group battles donor fatigue and rising anti-Ukrainian hostility

Nastya Podorozhnya was twenty-four years old and living in Krakow when Vladimir Putin announced his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. She had just graduated from Jagiellonian University. Within hours, Russian forces attacked Kyiv's Antonov Airport near her family's home. Two days before the full-scale assault began, she made the decision to return to Ukraine, crossing back into danger to help her sister and three young nieces escape to Poland.

What began as a personal act of rescue became something larger. Nastya recognized that her years in Poland had given her knowledge that newly arrived refugees desperately needed—how to navigate the healthcare system, book a doctor's appointment, buy a tram ticket, move through a country that was not their own. She also recognized a darker reality. Activists working against human trafficking told her that the chaos at the border in those first weeks after the invasion had created ideal conditions for exploitation. "People were so easily trusting the volunteers," she recalled, describing how traffickers saw the moment as an unprecedented opportunity.

She founded Martynka, named after her youngest niece, to provide shelter and support to the most vulnerable arrivals. The organization operates from a two-bedroom apartment in central Krakow and runs a hotline staffed in four languages. Since March 2022, it has fielded more than five thousand requests for help. Now it receives roughly one hundred calls each month. The team offers psychological support, legal assistance, and counseling to women and children fleeing domestic abuse, trafficking, and the broader violence of war. Over one hundred women and children have found shelter in that apartment. One young woman who stayed for an extended period had been drugged by her boyfriend—a man she had met as a teenager while escaping the invasion—and sold into sexual exploitation. Nastya's work is rooted partly in her own trauma. While studying in Krakow, a Ukrainian man attempted to rape her outside her dormitory. The legal process was long and difficult. Police detained the suspect, then released him. Eventually he was convicted and given a restraining order. That experience, Nastya said, gave her PTSD but also taught her how survivors are treated by systems meant to protect them.

The organization's survival has always depended on donations from international organizations. But the landscape has shifted dramatically. USAID funding cuts have intensified competition for grants. Donor fatigue has become a concrete constraint—Martynka has been forced to reduce its one-to-one therapy sessions. "Ukraine is not in the headlines anymore," Nastya told Deutsche Welle. "The international attention has moved elsewhere." She described the summer of 2026 as a grueling fundraising campaign. "It is so hard to convince people to donate to a Ukrainian organization right now. There is something called exhaustion, donor exhaustion, fundraising exhaustion." The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees confirmed the scale of the crisis in the aid sector. Jun Shirato, the acting representative for Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, said that funding cuts forced UNHCR to reduce its Poland staff by two-thirds—from one hundred twenty people at its peak in the months after the invasion to forty now. The organization closed three regional offices it had opened in Krakow, Lublin, and Rzeszow. Only the Warsaw office remains.

At the same time, the political and social climate surrounding Ukrainian refugees has deteriorated. In the months immediately after the invasion, many Poles opened their homes to Ukrainian families, including Nastya's own sister and nieces. That generosity has given way to something harder. Earlier in 2026, Poland introduced new rules restricting access to child benefits and free healthcare for refugees who do not work. Police statistics show that hate crimes against Ukrainians rose by one third in the first half of the year. Ukrainians now make up more than three quarters of all foreigners living in Poland, making them the most visible target for shifting sentiment.

Historical grievances have surfaced alongside this hostility. In May, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named a military unit after the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, which participated in the killing of tens of thousands of Poles during World War II. The decision triggered outrage in Poland. President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelenskyy of Poland's highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle. The dispute reflects a fundamental difference in historical memory. Poles focus on the UPA's massacres of Polish citizens. Many Ukrainians view the UPA and figures like Stepan Bandera as heroes because they fought Soviet occupation after the war. This collision of narratives has become a flashpoint for anger directed at the Ukrainian community.

Nastya has documented the consequences. She recorded a video after a Ukrainian family's car was destroyed—windows smashed, the words "Bandera people go back where you came from" sprayed in paint across the vehicle. The comments on that video wished her death and told her to leave Poland. She described the emotional toll as severe. She also attributes some of the hostility to deliberate amplification by Russian actors. "They do not want us to be together, or to remember who our common enemy is," she said. "They don't want Ukrainian refugees to integrate or feel welcome." Bots and coordinated campaigns, she suggested, are being used to stoke tensions between Poles and Ukrainians, deepening divisions that serve Russia's interests.

Despite the strain—the funding cuts, the donor fatigue, the rising hostility, the online abuse—Nastya said she remains optimistic. "I love my job so much," she told Deutsche Welle. "I would easily send my mother, my sister, my best friend to Martynka for support. I know there are few organizations that could provide such wonderful help." The question now is whether that commitment can survive the convergence of forces working against it: a world's attention moving elsewhere, resources drying up, and a host country's patience wearing thin.