POLAND. Wroclaw. 04 December 2022. Market at the former Wroclaw Świebodzki railway station.
In May 2022, It is estimated about 1.1 million Ukrainian immigrants in Poland. Many stay in large cities such as Warsaw, Kraków or Wrocław. Few months the start of the Russian-Ukranian conflict, an estimated 469,000 Ukrainians (including refugees and those who lived in Poland before February 2022) resided in Warsaw, 302,000 each in Wroclaw and Katowice, 230,000 in Krakow, and 224,000 in Gdansk (UPM 04/2022). According to the Union of Polish Metropolises, the population of Wroclaw has now increased by 29% as a result of Ukrainian refugees (source : https://metropolie.pl/fileadmin/news/2022/04/Ump_Ukraina_RAPORT_final_2.pdf).
But even before the attacks in February 2022, Wroclaw already had a quite significant Ukrainian community which added up to around 10-20% of the total population in Wroclaw.
Since 1989, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been waves of Ukrainian immigration, mostly of job seekers, tradesmen, and vendors, concentrated in larger cities with established markets.
An increased arrival of Ukrainian immigration in Poland has happened after 2014, with the start of the Russian-Ukrainian tension. Ukrainians constituted 25% of the entire immigrant resident population of Poland in 2015. According to the NBP, 1.2 million Ukrainian citizens worked legally in Poland in 2016. 1.7 million short-term work registrations were issued to them in 2017 (an eightfold increase compared to 2013).