11.02.2020, Toruń.
A group of tourists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus were beaten in the Polish Toruń for speaking Russian, the Togzp.naszemiasto.pl online newspaper reports on February 11.
Seven people attacked a group of five people consisting of an ethnic Pole, two Ukrainians, a Russian and a Belarusian, walking late in the evening in Torun, and started beating the tourists and shouting “Poland for the Poles”; they used foul language against the Ukrainians.
“They had not scrupled to beat up a girl. A fellow, a repatriated Pole, has a fractured skull, but fortunately it’s not that serious. We were attacked under the slogan ‘Poland for the Poles’ and ‘… … Ukrainians’. I would add that only two out of five were Ukrainians. I was most afraid of the passiveness of people who did not react and passed by indifferently ignoring the incident. The offenders managed to attack us, leave and then come back again starting to strike us with their fists,” one of the victims wrote on his page in Facebook.
The police have no doubt that this is a racist crime. The perpetrators are being tracked following street security cameras’ footage.
At the beginning of 2020, more than 200 thousand Ukrainians have applied for temporary or permanent residence in Poland. In addition, more than 1 million Ukrainian citizens regularly come as migrant workers.
Polish nationalists and the ultra-right are hostile to Ukrainian migrant workers. The Ukrainians are constantly being beaten up. In July 2019, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the hostel of Ukrainian workers who were building the subway in Warsaw. Luckily, no one was injured.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
