The Polish Defense Ministry might need to quietly let go of its planned “Ukrainian Legion”—a contingent of soldiers made up of military-aged Ukrainian refugees in Poland and equipped and trained by Warsaw—after being forced to admit that it’s struggling to recruit volunteers who would like to return home and fight on the frontlines.
The idea was conceived and announced in July during the Warsaw visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who signed a bilateral security agreement with Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
Shortly afterward, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski made some unexpected remarks—claiming that the project was at an advanced stage and that “several thousand” Ukrainian refugees in the country “have already registered” to join the legion. This surprised observers since no formal recruitment process had been launched at that point, or ever since.
There was no news of any subsequent development up until Wednesday, October 2nd, when Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz was asked about the legion in an interview with the daily Wirtualna Polska. The minister stressed that the plans were still officially on the table, but admitted that they don’t have enough volunteers at this point to move forward.
Kosiniak-Kamysz immediately shifted the blame to Ukraine, saying that the original deal was that Warsaw would handle the equipment and training of recruits—and it has been ready to do so since early September—but “we’re not responsible for recruitment,” which would have been Kyiv’s job. “I think the number of people who were supposed to sign up from the Ukrainian side is too small,” he said.
Citing anonymous sources last month, Polish media already reported about the frustration within the government for being “misled” by Kyiv about the allegedly high interest in fighting among Ukrainian refugees residing in the country. In his subsequent remarks in Wednesday’s interview, Kosiniak-Kamysz echoed these sentiments:
The [initial] Ukrainian declarations were very high [and indicated] that there would be [enough volunteers] to form a brigade, that is a few thousand people … But there are not that many willing people.
Kosiniak-Kamysz further stressed that Warsaw was without blame and that it’s still up to Kyiv to follow through with the recruitment process.
According to Wirtualna Polska, the minister’s criticism of Ukrainian officials for not producing numbers “astonished” them, because the country had not yet launched any official recruitment campaign to speak of. It’s unclear, however, whether this division of responsibilities was communicated clearly among the parties.
Poland has long been struggling to address the large number of military-aged male refugees coming to the European Union. Last spring, both Poland and Lithuania said they would help return refugees who escaped conscription to Ukraine if Kyiv requested it—even though the discussion quickly died out as deporting people into a war zone is not easily compatible with EU norms—while Sikorski called on EU countries to stop giving asylum and social benefits to draft dodgers just last month.
Kosiniak-Kamysz also touched upon this in the interview, saying that it “evokes a lot of emotions in Polish society” when people see “young men speaking Ukrainian who have not signed up” for military service.
According to official government figures, nearly a million Ukrainian refugees are living in Poland and around 125,000 of them are adult males. In addition, there are several hundred thousand economic migrants (without official refugee status), many of whom had been living in Poland since before the Russian invasion began in 2022.
