Warsaw, one of Kyiv’s top allies since the Russian invasion began, took the surprise decision amid a row over Ukrainian grain.
That is what Maryna Vasilevskaya, a Ukrainian woman of Polish origin, told Al Jazeera with a heavy sigh on Thursday after learning that Warsaw halted arms supply to Kyiv – and may cut aid to a million Ukrainian refugees it hosts.
Poland has supplied hundreds of Soviet-era tanks and 14 Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine in its time of need amid Russia’s invasion, served as a major transit hub for weapons from other Western nations, and provided its military bases for training Ukrainian servicemen.
It has also spent billions of euros on other forms of aid from the construction of temporary houses for refugees to donating medical supplies and power generators.
Vasilevskaya and her children were among the most vulnerable and desperate recipients of Poland’s aid – as well as its overwhelming, heart-melting moral support.
Her paternal grandparents were ethnic Poles, and she spent four months in the eastern Polish city of Krakow with her daughters aged five and eight last year after fleeing the Russian onslaught.
She returned to Kyiv in August because her husband Vladislav had a medical emergency and her eldest daughter Darya missed her schoolmates.
But despite the latest tensions, Vasilevskaya says she remains “eternally grateful” to Polish authorities and public.
She arrived in Krakow in mid-March 2022 on a slow overnight train jam-packed with crying children and frightened, disoriented grownups, but Poles welcomed them all like “dearest friends”.
“They helped us any way they could with everything, absolutely everything, from food and clothes to lodging and healthcare,” the 34-year-old, who works in marketing, recalled with tears in her eyes.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ our dislike to each other is finally over.’”
Poland once conquered huge swaths of Kyivan Rus, a medieval Eastern European confederation of principalities that spawned what is Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
It also was a conduit of Western influences from philosophy to visual arts, but its efforts to convert its Orthodox Christian subjects in what is now Ukraine to Roman Catholicism met resistance that partly paved the way to Moscow’s takeover.
