The police in southeastern Poland arrested a citizen of Ukraine on suspicion of carrying out a knife attack on Thursday that, according to state-owned news media, killed a priest and wounded four others at a Roman Catholic abbey near the border with Ukraine.
Officials in the Subcarpathia region of Poland said in a statement that the Ukrainian, 31, who was not named, attacked four men and a woman Thursday morning at the abbey, a 17th-century Benedictine nunnery in the town of Jaroslaw.
TVP Rzeszow, the local branch of the state broadcasting network, reported that the priest, one of three clergy members wounded, had died.
The motive for the attack was not immediately clear. Ukrainian nationals living in Europe, particularly young, jobless men fleeing the war against Russia, have been a frequent target for recruitment by Russian agencies looking for operatives to carry out sabotage and other attacks in Poland and elsewhere.
Some Ukrainians living in Poland, however, faced with what they see as rising antagonism against their presence, have expressed hostility against their host country of their own accord.
The knife attack on Thursday followed a series of small but sometimes violent street scuffles between Poles and Ukrainian refugees, millions of whom fled into Poland after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Many have since returned home or moved on to other European countries, but the Polish Interior Ministry in August estimated that at least 1.8 million remained in Poland.
Far-right Polish politicians have sought to stoke the animosity, accusing Ukrainian refugees of abusing Poland’s hospitality, which includes access to schools and free health care. Poland has stopped providing free housing and rolled back some of its support for Ukrainian refugees but has made no move to send them home.
The far right in Poland often plays on bitter memories dating to World War II, when Ukrainian nationalists massacred tens of thousands of Poles in a western region of Ukraine that was then part of Poland.
In May, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, added to the tensions by signing a decree honoring wartime nationalist fighters whom Poles hold responsible for those killings, which the Poles call the Volhynia Genocide.
Poland’s government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a centrist, has worked to restore relations to an even keel, alarmed that a rupture over history would imperil one of the closest alliances in Eastern Europe against Russia.
Much of the American and European weaponry and ammunition provided to Ukraine passes through bases and travels on highways and railroads through Poland.
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting.
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