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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