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Forced Migrants with a Question Mark: Displaced Ukrainian Roma in Poland

Text by Dr. Kamila Fiałkowska, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw.

„A Roma is a Roma” is what I heard during one of many interviews we did during our fieldwork in Poland. Our ethnography of the reception conditions in small, mostly rural localities in Poland, where arrival of few hundreds of displaced Ukrainians changed, even if temporarily, the everyday realities. As we talked with our interlocutors about the beginning of the full-scale invasion and the arrival of displaced people from Ukraine, we were told stories of unprecedented social mobilisation and outpouring sympathy to the arriving people, much like recorded in research in other localities (Dunn & Kaliszewska, 2023; Fomina & Pachocka, 2024; Jarosz & Klaus, 2023). Our interviewees emphasised the local response to immediate needs, describing how people hosted in private accommodations were cocooned in care and offered unwavering support. It was not without difficulties, e.g. the inhabitants were recalling the complicated Polish-Ukrainian past, marked with violence (especially during WWII, see e.g. Motyka, 2018), especially in  the borderland areas, near the border with Ukraine. So were the doubts whether the support, even if well intentioned, was well planned and executed. In localities with little to no prior experience of receiving forced migrants, the rapid mobilisation and the ad hoc construction of reception infrastructures were anything but ordinary. 

“A Roma is a Roma” is hardly a new or original statement. After all, one of the few widely read reportages about Roma in Europe by a prominent Polish author bears the telling title “Cygan to Cygan” (translating to “A Gypsy is a Gypsy”, Ostałowska, 2012). For the majority population, the phrase may appear innocuous, a simple assertion of difference. Yet beneath this apparent simplicity lies an ocean of simplifications, assumptions, and sedimented stereotypes into which we, non-Roma, are socialised. Through such seemingly self-evident formulations, we learn who is who, how difference is to be recognised, and how the presence of Roma should be interpreted and managed.

Accommodation centre in northeast Poland, which is now closed. At the moment of functioning, it hosted between 200-300 displaced Ukrainians – both Roma and non-Roma. Photo: Kamila Fiałkowska

This seemingly self-evident difference, and the practical consequences attached to it, surfaced very early in the reception of displaced people arriving in Poland from Ukraine (Mirga-Wójtowicz et al., 2022). Although the European Union’s Temporary Protection framework formally extended protection to all persons residing in Ukraine prior to the full-scale Russian invasion, its implementation revealed what mobility justice scholars have long observed: mobility is neither distributed equally, nor is the right to it recognised equally (Sheller, 2018). The right to move across borders does not automatically entail the right to be received as a legitimate subject of protection. For Ukrainian Roma fleeing the war, physical mobility was not matched by moral or political recognition. Their access to protection was mediated by racialised scripts that pre-emptively cast doubt on their intentions and legitimacy.

“Is this some kind of apartheid?”

Public statements and everyday administrative encounters made these hierarchies evident, however, often they were masked under the seemingly neutral language and approach (Mirga-Wójtowicz, 2026). What also took place was the very direct naming and labelling of Ukrainian Roma forced migrants and framing their arrivals in openly anti-Roma language. They were described as “swindlers” and “self-proclaimed refugees” by a mayor of Przemyśl. As stated by this city hall employee: “They come here for benefits, nothing more. They are not refugees; they are economic travellers.” (Durjasz et al., 2023). Such utterances functioned as boundary-making practices. They redefined who counted as a “real” refugee and who did not, effectively narrowing the circle of deservingness (Babakova et al., 2022). In mobility justice terms, this was not merely a question of border crossing but of differential valuation of lives on the move – a hierarchy that distinguishes between those whose displacement is recognised as forced and those whose movement is seen as opportunistic, and their forced migration seen as bogus, economic migrants at best.

These distinctions expose the limits of formal citizenship and legal status. As one interlocutor assisting in registration of newly arriving forced migrants in the collective accommodation centre recalled:

“They [local authorities] told me no more Gypsies, we already have too many of them. So I asked them: what’s that, is this some kind of apartheid?! They have the same Ukrainian passport!”

The possession of the same passport and the same formal eligibility for temporary protection proved insufficient to secure equal treatment without intervention. This situation also proves that citizenship, imagined as a stable legal status, appeared instead as differentiated and stratified, requiring enactments. Ukrainian Roma were seen as suspect bearers of rights, their claims subject to heightened scrutiny. This resonates with theories of unequal, hierarchical, differentiated or fringes of citizenship (Aradau et al., 2013; Sardelić, 2021; Szewczyk et al., 2025; Vermeersch, 2014), in which formal equality coexists with uneven recognition and conditional inclusion.

“This is their culture”

Essentialising culturalist explanations further naturalised this hierarchy. In the eyes of the local authorities where the collective accommodation hosting Ukrainian Roma were based, they were portrayed as “not really interested in school, not really, they like to hang around. This is their culture, they always hand around in groups”. Even the question “So Roma also flee the war?” heard during our fieldwork reveals not only the naivety of the interlocutor but also the depth of discursive othering of Roma. Romani experiences of violence and forced migration are treated as qualitatively different, as if war affects them in another register. In this framing, Roma are not readily intelligible as people displaced  by war in the same way as their non-Roma co-citizens.

Information campaign by Towards Dialogue Foundation about enrollment of children to school. Placed at the door to the day-care centre at the collective accommodation centre in east Poland. Photo: Kamila Fiałkowska

What is at stake, therefore, is not simply prejudice but the drawing of political boundaries around the community worthy of protection. Discursive exclusions precede and legitimise material inequalities: doubts about whether and how Roma should be supported were articulated from the outset, grounded in suspicions of fraud and moral unworthiness. If “a Roma is a Roma,” the phrase does not merely mark difference; it stabilises a hierarchy of belonging and continuous mistrust: would they do the good use of the material support or sell the goods on the market? It silences and invisibles Roma agency as well as suffering, as their loss is not fully commensurable with “ours.”

In this way, hierarchies of belonging translate into hierarchies of citizenship. The reception of displaced persons from Ukraine demonstrates how a formally universal protection regime can operate through deeply stratified practices of recognition, undermining recognition of certain categories of persons as legitimate subjects of protection. The unequal reception of Roma refugees thus reveals the enduring racialised limits of European solidarity, limits that become particularly visible in moments of crisis (Mirga-Wójtowicz, 2026).

Isolated incidents these are not

The patterns described above are not isolated incidents, nor are they reducible to the contingencies of the current displacement. Other research in Central and Eastern Europe documents that in the past Roma experiences of forced migration were seen as highly suspicious, casting doubts and question mark on the legitimacy of their move and claims to protection (Fiałkowska, 2024; Fiałkowska et al., 2022; Joskowicz, 2016; Sobotka, 2003). Placed in longer trajectory, the ambivalence or outright refusal to see Ukrainian Roma fleeing Ukraine as “real” forced migrants appears less exceptional. It is, however, more than just a question about being perceived as forced migrants. It reaches into the core of political membership. To doubt whether Ukrainian Roma are forced migrants is simultaneously to question whether they are fully intelligible as citizens: neighbours, colleagues, friends, workers, mothers and fathers, soldiers, students, the unemployed, the elderly, and children – all those who built the social fabrics of the societies that we live in, be it in Ukraine or in Poland. 

What is at stake is thus not only access to protection. In fact, access to protection is merely a consequence of unequal recognition and belonging. The repeated need to verify that Roma “also flee the war” and whether or not they are “swindlers” suggests that their claims to suffering, loss, and attachment to place are persistently questioned. Such questioning reflects entrenched ethnic boundary-making that predates the current displacement and extends beyond it and thus intersects with a more fundamental inequality within citizenship: Roma are formally included yet symbolically and materially positioned at its margins. Seen in this light, the reception of displaced Ukrainian Roma does not mark a rupture but rather exposes the continuity of a longer pattern in which racialised difference structures both the recognition and the distribution of rights.

This work was carried out with funding from the National Science Centre, Poland under the OPUS call within the Weave programme No. 2022/47/I/HS5/03011, as part of the project “Unequal Citizenship and Transnational Mobilisation of Polish, Czech and Ukrainian Roma in the Face of the War in Ukraine”.

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The views and opinions expressed in the blog posts are solely those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of Entanglements. Polish and Ukrainian Studies blog or its team. The authors of the texts bear full responsibility for the accuracy of the facts presented in the publications and the correctness of the quotations.

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entanglements (March 11, 2026). Forced Migrants with a Question Mark: Displaced Ukrainian Roma in Poland. Entanglements. Retrieved June 17, 2026 from https://entanglements.hypotheses.org/6550


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