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Old 6th July 2009, 18:56
MichaelB_PL MichaelB_PL is offline
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MichaelB_PL
I live in Poland, which is a neighbour of Ukraine.

Many points of Ukraine's image in Poland are similiar to those from Svizzera's list, especially the points 1-4 from his/her list and I'll partially use his/her list.

1) Deep poverty. Ukrainians who come to work in Poland work for very little money and yet they are happy, they tend to say very negative things about the level of living in Ukraine.

2) Very high instability in all facts of Ukrainian life whether its the government or society in generall - one of the elements from both tales of Ukrainians who come to Poland and tales of Poles who went to Ukraine is the general instability and lack of order. I think criminality is high there and in many cases the officials cooperate with the criminals.

3) Very low wages - basically the sequel to #1, many Ukrainians receive salaries or pensions barely allowing them to survive.

4) Extremely high corruption - linked to #2, bribes are de facto the standard element of economy in Ukraine, perhaps more so than the law. Active bribe exhortion is the norm, especially with the police and border guard/customs officers, but in reality no business can operate there without paying bribes on regular basis.

5) A country that is highly uncapable to make proper decisions that will benefit the society in the future - we think that Ukraine has a huge "inertia ball" of poverty, criminality, corruption, and so on and that Ukrainian politicians are the same, they are not standing apart of the problem and really fighting to fix it, but rather are a part of the problem.

6) A non citizen orientated government - the government in the Ukraine fail to really listen to the needs of the Ukrainian people and heed this advice. We tend to get an impression that generally a Ukrainian citizen has really few really present rights in Ukraine.

7) Illegal workers, criminals, prostitutes. There are lots of illegal workers in Poland - that is Ukrainians who are here legally but work illegally, there are also lots of prostitutes and criminals from Ukraine have joined the "criminal scene" in Poland.

8) The traditional "Ukrainian savage" stereotype - it was probably born during the WW2 because of the so called "Volhynian Massacres" commited by UPA upon Polish civilians - especially many of the medium age and old people tend to associate Ukrainians with these war crimes, which creates a stereotype of Ukrainians being primitve, brutal, etc etc.


As one can notice, I've skipped Svizzera's #7): Counteless years of Russia/Ukrainian disputes, because it's not a part of the image of Ukraine/Ukrainians in Poland - perhaps because we have our own disputes with Russia which divert our attention.

My #7 is similiar to Svizzera's #8, but different - Ukrainians have some legal possibilities of immigrating to Poland and many do so, but also many Ukrainians work as illegal workers who work in Poland in the "grey zone" (without paying taxes,etc), also many Ukrainian girls work as prostitutes.
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