Poland's PiS Party Proposes Deporting Unemployed Ukrainian Men of Military Age If It Returns to Power

Poland's largest opposition party wants to send Ukrainian men packing if they can't prove they're working legally.

Law and Justice (PiS), the national-conservative party that governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, laid out the proposal Thursday at a policy conference in Warsaw titled "Towards a New Government." PiS deputy leader Tobiasz Bocheński announced that one of the party's first moves back in power would be deporting Ukrainian men of military age who aren't legally employed in Poland.

"One of our government's first, most significant decisions will be to deport men, Ukrainians of military age, who are not legally working in Poland," Bocheński said, according to Notes from Poland. "They will have the opportunity to fight for their homeland, so that the horrors of this war can quickly end."

A News, citing Radio Poland, reported the policy would target men aged 25 to 60, both the unemployed and those working illegally, and that PiS plans to build dedicated deportation centers to process them.

PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński framed the policy as pro-Ukraine, not anti-Ukraine. "It is not about deporting everyone, only those who are here, do not work legally and are of military age," Kaczyński told reporters, as cited by Do Rzeczy and reported by ZeroHedge. "This is helping Ukraine in terms of mobilization." Kaczyński argued Kyiv faces a serious manpower shortage and needs to be ready if Russia escalates mobilization after Ukraine's legislative elections in September.

PiS spokesman Rafał Bochenek put it more bluntly: "Men who don't work in our country should work and be active on the front lines, because that's where their homeland is. It's not Poles or other nationalities who should be sent to the front lines, but Ukrainians who should defend their homeland."

The labor data problem

Poland's labor ministry data shows only around 11,000 Ukrainians registered as unemployed in the country, according to Interia, and that figure isn't broken down by sex. Most of those registered as unemployed are believed to be women. PiS's policy would sweep in a different group entirely: Ukrainians working in Poland's informal "grey economy" without registering or paying taxes, which Interia notes is a separate and larger population.

Almost one million Ukrainian refugees remain in Poland since fleeing Russia's invasion, alongside hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainian immigrants who arrived before 2022, making them by far the largest foreign national group in the country, according to Notes from Poland. PiS gave no details on how deportations would work legally for Ukrainians who are lawfully resident and haven't broken any laws.

Government pushback and political context

Government figures condemned the proposal as "absurd and disgusting," according to Notes from Poland, though the outlet did not name which specific officials used those terms. Poland's Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski separately stated that military-age Ukrainian men in other European countries should not receive social benefits, though he tied that comment to benefits policy rather than deportation.

Notes from Poland frames the announcement as part of a broader hardening of PiS's stance toward Ukraine as the party competes with Poland's far right for voters. PiS has recently seen falling poll numbers and the defection of a breakaway group of more moderate lawmakers. That's a material piece of context ZeroHedge's writeup, sourced from Remix News, leaves out entirely, focusing instead on the Volhynia massacre disputes and Zelensky's stripped honors as the backdrop for the policy.

The Volhynia dispute is real and adds friction. Poland's President Karol Nawrocki stripped Volodymyr Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle in June after Ukraine named a military unit for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a group linked to the massacres of Poles during World War II. Zelensky has since floated a National Pantheon that could honor Ukrainian nationalist figures tied to those killings, and Ukraine's parliament has backed draft legislation supporting the project.

Whether any of this becomes law depends on an election that hasn't happened. PiS is in opposition, not government, and Poland's parliamentary elections are not scheduled until next year. The proposal is a campaign plank, not policy. Whether PiS can win back power, and whether it would actually attempt mass deportations of a population estimated in the hundreds of thousands given no legal mechanism has been specified, remains an open question with real consequences for how Poland's roughly one million Ukrainian refugees plan their futures.