Aleksei

Aleksei comes from the Greek Alexios, built on the verb alexein, to defend or ward off. The same root sits inside Aleksander. So the meaning given here, defender and helper, obrońca and wspomagający, stays close to the word itself rather than being a later gloss stuck on afterward.

In Polish the name settles into Aleksy. Saint Aleksy, the man of God who lived unrecognized under his own family's stairs, gave the form a fixed place in the calendar, and his imieniny falls on 17 July.

The cultural pull, though, is Russian. Aleksei runs through the Romanov line and through Russian fiction, from Tolstoy's characters to the last tsarevich. A Polish register might hold both the local Aleksy and the borrowed Aleksei.

Short and blunt. Two syllables do the work. What a child named Aleksei inherits is a Greek verb about standing in front of someone to keep harm off them, plus a Polish cousin, Aleksy, already waiting in the same list of saints.