Only 17% of Ukrainian refugees say they want to settle in Poland for good, according to one survey
consultant, and her mother, a housewife, escaped to Poland in early March, a week after Russian missiles began falling on Kyiv, their home town. Three months later they are returning. “It’s hard to live a normal life when all you think of is your country,” Valeria says, standing alongside a bundle of bags, and hundreds of other Ukrainians, at a train station in Warsaw, the Polish capital.
As many as 600,000 Ukrainians are staying with Polish families. The rest live with friends or relatives, in dormitories, hotels and resorts or on their own. But problems are surfacing. In urban areas the influx has compounded a housing shortage and driven up prices. Rents in Warsaw are up by an average of more than 40% compared with a year ago, over three times the current rate of inflation. The supply of rental properties has plunged. Apartments listed one day are snapped up the next.
But the housing problem may become even more acute in the coming months. Polish host families and their Ukrainian guests may soon tire of sharing the same bathroom and washing machine. Once resorts or youth camps reopen for the summer-holiday season, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians living there may have to look for other places to stay. With housing scarce and expensive, they risk finding none.
Yet language barriers and bureaucratic obstacles to getting skills and diplomas recognised mean that refugees who held white-collar jobs back home are often pushed into low-paid work, says Myroslava Keryk of Ukrainian House, a group helping Ukrainians in Poland. The war has caused a shortage of workers in sectors like industry and construction. Of the 110,000 Ukrainian truck drivers who worked in Poland before the war, some 40,000 have gone home to fight.
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