Pavlo Levchuk: “The Question of Language Is a Question of State Policy”

“In 2022, a third of the students at my Kraków school were Ukrainian”

— Mr Pavlo, what is your story?

— I am from Rivne. After finishing secondary school, I went to study in Poland. I first completed a preparatory course at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, and then enrolled in Polish studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. I finished my master’s degree in 2014, in the rather niche specialisation of Teaching Polish as a Foreign Language. My professor Władysław Miodunka then asked me to write a dissertation on Ukrainian-Russian-Polish multilingualism among Ukrainians with no Polish roots. This was important because it was generally assumed that people who studied Polish around the world were of Polish origin. Yet many Ukrainians, having no Polish heritage, were coming to study in Poland.

That is how my academic career in Poland began. Since August 2017 I have been an associate professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. I have also been an examiner in Polish as a foreign language for over ten years, conducting state certification exams — and I have taught Polish to foreigners from more than 30 countries.

— I also know that you work in a Polish school?

— Yes, at School No. 151 in Kraków. Back in 2019, the then Consul General of Ukraine in Kraków, Oleh Mandiuk, invited me to teach Ukrainian. That school already had children from Ukraine, and I taught Ukrainian there on a permanent basis from 2019 to 2022. It was a precedent for the Polish education system. I was also engaged as a specialist in teaching Polish as a foreign language.

— …and then came the February 2022 that was terrible for every Ukrainian…

— From the very first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, our school set up an organisational committee to help Ukrainians. Parents of Polish children began bringing rucksacks, notebooks, and all kinds of school supplies. We still have about 30 such packs. Signs in two languages — Polish and Ukrainian — still hang on classroom doors: Library, Staff Room, Principal’s Office… School No. 151 in Kraków has over a thousand pupils. The record number of Ukrainian children in 2022 was around 350 — a third of the school. In the first two years there was constant turnover among Ukrainian pupils: some arrived, some moved on… Now we have around 200 Ukrainian students.

“Many Ukrainian children were studying in two schools simultaneously: in-person at a Polish school and remotely at a Ukrainian one”

— What was the hardest part of teaching Ukrainian pupils in a Polish school?

— The children had lost the habit of sitting in a classroom: three years of the pandemic had simply untrained them. There were many pupils with behavioural difficulties — one even tried to set fire to the school, supposedly accidentally throwing burning scraps of paper. In general, many children arrived traumatised by the war. The most difficult communication was with those who had lost someone at the front.

As for learning itself, Ukrainian children very often studied in two schools at once: in person at a Polish school and remotely at a Ukrainian one. That is an enormous burden on a child. That is precisely why I proposed introducing Ukrainian as a second foreign language in Polish schools.

— And it was the Pylyp Orlyk Foundation that funded the development of this programme. And this very academic year your innovation is being rolled out in the Polish education system!

— The Polish education system declares that all children up to the age of 18 must receive schooling — it is a compulsory obligation. So from 2024, all Ukrainian children, like other foreign nationals, were required to attend Polish schools (before that, for two years, Ukrainian pupils had been able to study exclusively online in Ukrainian schools). At the same time, the green light was given to what is called the “Ukrainian Component” in Polish educational institutions. Polish law provides that if there are at least seven pupils in a school who wish to study the language of their country of origin, the school must provide the infrastructure for this. The teacher’s salary is then covered by the state whose citizens those pupils are, or by cultural and educational institutions.

— Was Ukraine’s Ministry of Education involved in this process in any way?

— Ukraine’s Ministry of Education interpreted the proposal in its own way — as if Poland were funding everything. And so the process was effectively stopped before it even began. We then found another route: for the Polish side to cover all costs (there was no point waiting for funding from the Ukrainian government), Ukrainian would have to be introduced as a second foreign language. The decision to organise such classes rests with the school principal — on the basis of a petition from parents and provided a teacher is available.

— But there was no corresponding curriculum!

— Exactly. Ukraine’s Ministry of Education, despite periodic appeals, never produced a curriculum for studying Ukrainian as a foreign language. So I took the decision to develop one myself — and I did. For grades 7–8 in general secondary schools — level A1 (two years of study). For lyceums, technical colleges, and vocational schools — A2–B1 (four years of study). Both programmes were published in July and August 2025.

“Over 500 students in Poland are now studying Ukrainian as a second foreign language using my programme”

— How many Polish schools have already introduced Ukrainian into their curriculum?

— I cannot give you an exact number of schools, but according to the Polish education system’s data, more than 500 students are currently studying under my programme. The frontrunners are Warsaw, Bielsko-Biała, Kraków, and Wrocław. Among the first to adopt the programme was Lyceum No. 15 in Wrocław, whose vice-principal is Ukrainian. Additionally, within just six months, my grades 7–8 programme has been downloaded more than 1,400 times online — it is freely available.

— Are there enough teachers of Ukrainian in Poland?

— Any Ukrainian citizen with a Ukrainian higher education degree and a teaching qualification can teach Ukrainian in Poland. The final decision rests with the school principal — some prefer their teachers to also hold a qualification obtained in Poland. When I was developing my programmes, I built a database of potential teachers: a Facebook post I wrote at the time drew responses from 120 teachers across 12 Polish voivodeships. I also proposed the idea of launching a postgraduate programme in Ukrainian as a Foreign Language. A private university in Warsaw is ready to introduce such studies. The curriculum exists, the lecturers exist. The only open question right now is lecturer pay. If we secure funding, we could graduate up to three dozen qualified teachers of Ukrainian with Polish diplomas each year. There is no equivalent programme outside Ukraine anywhere in the world. We would be the first. And that would open the door to Ukrainian entering higher education in Poland as well.

We have already held two major conferences on the study of Ukrainian in Poland — in December 2025 in Wrocław and on 16–17 March 2026 in Warsaw. Each brought together more than 100 participants. I am grateful to the Pylyp Orlyk Foundation for supporting our conferences. We are trying to bring the Ukrainian state in as a full participant in these processes. There is already a precedent — in Great Britain, the Polish language displaced Russian from education. So there is no monopoly. One simply needs to act.

— Russian propaganda, I imagine, is not particularly thrilled by your work…

— Russian trolls have been actively terrorising Poland’s information space for the past five years — over any issue whatsoever. My programme also came under attack. The Polish channel TVP.info asked me to comment on the matter, because within just a few months in 2025, some 92,000 negative comments and 32 million views had accumulated against the introduction of Ukrainian in Polish schools. It was an extremely powerful and targeted anti-Ukrainian campaign.

“In 2022, 75% of Ukrainian eighth-graders in Poland chose… Russian for their foreign language exam”

— Another major development is that from 2026, Poland became the first country in the world to introduce a matura — the mandatory school-leaving exam — in Ukrainian as a foreign language!

— Yes, graduates can now choose Ukrainian for their exam on equal terms with other foreign languages: English, German, French… This is a powerful precedent and a real step forward. There are so many Ukrainians in Poland now — at the start of 2026, between 1.5 and over 2 million Ukrainian citizens were in Poland, of whom around 993,000 hold temporary protection status (PESEL UKR) — that they already have the right to continue into higher education having sat an exam in Ukrainian, their mother tongue. I know that as of now, more than 200 pupils have already signed up to sit the matura in Ukrainian in Poland. Incidentally, in 2025, ten thousand Ukrainian children were born in Poland. In six years those children will start school. And it is up to us to decide whether they will have the opportunity to study Ukrainian in Poland.

— This is strategic progress for Ukraine as a whole. Let me share my own experience: in 2022 I worked as a teaching assistant in a Polish primary school. I had two eighth-graders — one from Kharkiv, one from Kovel. Both chose Russian for their school foreign language exam, because that option was available. And it was a paradox: Russia was bombing Ukraine, and our child refugees were sitting exams in Russian…

— In fact, even back in 2022, eighth-graders had the option of choosing Ukrainian for their foreign language exam, but this was never properly communicated at a state or education level. So only three pupils sat Ukrainian at the time. The majority — 75 percent — chose Russian. Now, Russian can only be sat by pupils who studied the language in a Polish school as their second foreign language.

“People have no motivation to invest their time and money in learning Ukrainian”

— Your book “Multilingualism of Wartime Migrants from Ukraine in Poland” was nominated in Poland for the Jerzy Giedroyc Prize and in Ukraine for the Ivan Franko Prize. I would like to speak with you as an expert about Russian-speaking Ukrainians — a widespread phenomenon…

— This happens for several reasons. First, some Ukrainians see no motivation to switch to Ukrainian. In my research there was one woman from Crimea — now a foreign-based lawyer in Kraków. She recounted that during her childhood in Crimea, Ukrainian teachers were not respected. When the peninsula was annexed in 2014, there was constant blame for being Russian-speaking and minimal support. And her third argument was that she saw no connection between switching to Ukrainian in daily life and that triggering broader change in Ukraine’s linguistic landscape. At the same time, this woman is now thinking about which language to use with her young son, who was born in Poland. Another example: a student from Ukraine whose father, a fighter pilot in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was shot down in a helicopter near Ilovaisk. And yet this young man still sees no motivation to switch to Ukrainian.

There is also a didactic problem: I see no effective courses on the market, no quality textbooks or teaching materials to help people learn or transition to Ukrainian. This is a complex linguistic issue. There are also no textbooks for teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language to children — unlike, say, textbooks for teaching Polish as a foreign language. When Poland received millions of Ukrainian refugees in 2022, people were offered an enormous choice of such handbooks — around 50 of them.

The question of language is a question of state policy. In Ukraine, even the specialised Institute of the Commissioner for the Protection of the State Language is too weak to address language issues strategically and consistently. There is talk now of a 7% rollback since Ukraine’s language boom of 2022. I believe the real figure is even higher. People have no motivation to invest their time and money in learning Ukrainian.

“The wave of hatred against Ukrainians in Poland is already subsiding”

— There is a great deal of information about periodic conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians. How significantly has Polish society’s attitude towards Ukrainians changed over the past four years?

— Is it really all that bad? No, it is not so clear-cut. When Natalia Panchenko began collecting money in Poland for generators for Kyiv this winter, she raised more than the target sum in just a few days. At the appeal of Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church Grzegorz Ryś, Poles donated millions of zlotys in churches. Kraków held a widely talked-about campaign, “Warm Soup for Kyiv”. When I approached them about a venue for our language conference in Wrocław, I received it free of charge, even though the rental costs a considerable sum. There are many Poles who support Ukraine. And Polish politicians at the highest level constantly declare that supporting Ukraine is in Poland’s interest. In my view, the wave of hatred against Ukrainians in Poland is already subsiding. Polish society is maturing towards the understanding that there are no grounds for the wholesale persecution of our people.

— After all, all the flashpoints are stoked by Russian propaganda. Meanwhile, the benefits of Ukrainians’ presence in Poland — such as the fact that between 2022 and 2024, the total sum of taxes and social contributions paid by Ukrainians in Poland amounted to 51.3 billion zlotys — are not being communicated very effectively…

— Right from the start, in 2022, Ukrainians in Poland were actively looking for work. They were posting adverts — offering to make varenyky and so on. Many started working in positions below their qualifications. Everyone managed somehow.

It is worth recalling here that in 2021 Poland faced a migration crisis: large numbers of people from third-world countries were attempting to enter Poland via Belarus. This was engineered to breed hatred of migrants, and Polish society split in two. Then in 2022, when the wave of refugees from Ukraine arrived, Poles united again — they became one. I remember how UNESCO representatives from Malta were astonished at the time: two million Ukrainians had arrived, but there were no refugee camps, no homeless people rummaging through bins. I explained it this way: Russian propaganda, in all its scheming, failed to account for one key thing — one mature European civilisation (Polish) had, because of aggression by a common enemy, taken another mature European civilisation (Ukrainian) into its own homes.

Interview by Halyna Huzio. Photo courtesy of Pavlo Levchuk.