Poland’s right-wing government has garnered praise for the generous welcome it has extended to refugees from neighbouring Ukraine.

But as Russia’s invasion enters its sixth month, aid workers and local civil society activists are warning that the relatively well-managed reception so far could soon start running into problems as volunteers who have been providing critical support burn out and plans to address the longer-term needs of the displaced seem lacking.

Between 1.5 million and two million Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion are estimated to be staying in Poland, including some 1.2 million who have registered for protection. That’s more than double any other country in the EU, where a total of around 3.7 million refugees from Ukraine have registered under a Temporary Protection Directive (TPD).

Activated at the beginning of March, this gives them the right to live, work and access services in any of the EU’s 27 member states for at least a year. Around 90 per cent of Ukrainian refugees are women and children.

In Poland, a special act codifying the TPD at the national level grants Ukrainian refugees the right to: stay in the country for 18 months; access the labour market and publicly funded healthcare system; attend Polish schools and universities, and receive social benefits and assistance on a par with Polish citizens.

“The government created… a really enabling legal environment for Ukrainian refugees to be in Poland,” Neil Brighton, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Poland country director, says. “[But] we’re a bit aware of that gap between what is envisioned as a result of this enabling special act and what some of the reality will be for people who maybe get left behind.”

The number of new Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland has decreased significantly since the first months of the war. And according to a recent report by the Polish Economic Institute (PIE), a state-affiliated think tank, the response by the government and society has shifted from an initial spontaneous phase to a focus on adaptation and integration.

In the spontaneous phase, much of the work of addressing the day-to-day needs of Ukrainians was shouldered by volunteers, civil society organisations, and municipal governments. In the later phases, refugees are expected to start getting jobs and finding their own housing, with Poland’s welfare system filling in the gaps and the role of volunteers and civil society decreasing, the report said.

By the beginning of June, some 185,000 Ukrainian refugees had found jobs in Poland – around half in low-skilled positions. And Poland’s reception of Ukrainians has been held up by the UN and others as exemplary, especially in comparison to its treatment of non-Ukrainian asylum seekers and migrants crossing the Polish-Belarusian border.

But NGO workers and local civil society activists are concerned that even Ukrainians who have found work will struggle to make ends meet and that the needs of people escaping war – including financial assistance, psychological support, medical care and more – go beyond what the Polish welfare system is designed to address. They also say that not enough has been done to increase the capacity of the Polish housing market, education system and other essential services to accommodate more than a million refugees.

A spokesperson for the Polish government said via email that it has been working closely with NGOs and local authorities since February to prepare for and manage the arrival and hosting of Ukrainian refugees, distributing “several billion złoty” (1 złoty = 0.21 euro) to support activities to help Ukrainian refugees.

But with hundreds of thousands of school-aged Ukrainians set to enter an already overburdened Polish education system in September and many volunteers and activists facing exhaustion, the situation in Poland for many Ukrainian refugees will likely soon become more difficult, according to Agnieszka Kosowicz, president and founder of the Polish Migration Forum, an NGO.

“We are… just before a stage where there will be a collapse of lots of things,” Kosowicz said. “I’m expecting homeless people. I’m expecting kids that won’t have access to education. I expect exploitation in the labour market.”

In the three months after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, an estimated 77 per cent of Poland’s population of around 38 million people got involved with providing help to Ukrainian refugees, according to the PIE report. The amount of money individuals spent on helping between the end of February and the end of May was greater than the amount Poles donated to charity in all of 2021, the report said.

“Everybody was doing something, either providing a room or a house or looking for transport, going to the border and back, fundraising with friends, organising a concert, or something,” said Helena Krajewska, a spokesperson for the NGO Polish Humanitarian Action. “It was overwhelming how many people wanted to help.”

But six months later, the level of support coming from Polish citizens has declined. “People… feel tired; they feel exhausted by this constant need of helping others,” Krajewska said.

This exhaustion could have a particular big impact on where and whether Ukrainian refugees have a place to live. An estimated seven per cent of Poles – or around 2.6 million people – have hosted Ukrainians in their homes at some point since the end of February.

Many hosted people for a short period of time before they travelled to other EU countries or found their own accommodation in Poland. But the housing market in Poland – particularly in bigger cities – is saturated.

“It’s very difficult right now to rent something relatively cheap, because everything is very expensive, and the most important thing is that there’s no flat on the market,” Tomasz Pactwa, director of the City of Warsaw’s department of welfare and social projects, says.

“We are not able to create extra flats in a couple of months. It’s beyond our capacity,” Pactwa continued. But the city of Warsaw is renovating around 2,000 existing apartment units to accommodate Ukrainians and has plans to invest in more affordable housing in the coming years, he added.

The Polish government is working on a draft strategy to help integrate Ukrainian refugees that includes establishing more public housing and renovating vacant properties to make them habitable, the spokesperson said, but did not mention when the new units are expected to be available.

• The New Humanitarian report