I’ve not said much about Ukraine on social media. This has been in part because I want to respect the limits of my understanding of that country and neighbouring Russia. While I know various things about these two nations, plenty of other things, I don’t, and I do not want my statements to stretch beyond my understanding. Additionally, I see friction between the immediate reaction to world events that social media encourages and the more measured pace at which we can verify information. It can give a sense of control to feel like you’re making up-to-the-second statements on the politics at hand. However, when giving in to that urge, we’ve been too often fulfiling our desire for agency, at the expense of recognising the realities for the people victimised by the war.
Of course, lack of knowledge hasn’t ever stopped the NatSec wonks. There is a model of journalist custom-built for times like these. The one that asserts that the relationship between Russia and the rest of the world is so complex that only they can demystify it. But paradoxically, that it’s so simple, it comes down to a good guy/bad guy paradigm in which the moral actions always just happen to align with what would be most convenient for the US government. And I’m worried that we find ourselves in an environment where the imperial mindset prevails once again. Where, as during the Cold War or Iraq or Afghanistan, the US and their allies must be treated as uncomplicated heroes. They are to be exempt from moral assessments, and anyone who might have any complaints to make is simply “spreading enemy propaganda”.
To be clear, this isn’t a “both sides” piece about the war. Russia is an expansionist force that is killing and maiming people, destroying their homes for the sake of climbing the ladder of power. The Ukrainian people are victims of an atrocity and deserve our full moral support in defending themselves and their homeland against invasion. Not that it matters to Russia, but their defence that they’re “Denazifying” Ukraine rings hollow coming from a nation that silences journalists, criminalises protest, and persecutes LGBTQIA+ minorities. Where I get uncomfortable is in the glorification of the Ukrainian government as a whole and the belief that any action made in the name of stopping Russia is ethical.
Like, you should condemn any government that works against the rights of minorities in the strongest possible terms. So, how do you square that principle with Zelenskyy saying that seeing Stepan Bandera, historical Nazi collaborator, as a hero, is “normal and cool”? Zelenskyy himself is Jewish, so we can’t see this in the simple context of punching down, and large numbers of Ukrainians still oppose Bandera. But all that considered, maybe the Prime Minister lionising supporters of a Holocaust perpetrator might still represent a bit of a problem. It would be easy to see the Ukrainian authorities as a league of heroes from A to Z, given that they now oppose fascist Russia. However, in some cases, this would constitute support for the oppression we claim to oppose, weaving valiant myths about a country with Stepan Bandera statues, stamps, and museums.
Here is a short list of other things happening in Ukraine that might not be so great:
- 78 Ukrainian lawmakers are trying to get Bandera’s national “hero” title reinstated.
- A literal Neo-Nazi paramilitary serves as part of the national guard.
- The country does not recognise same-sex marriage and has made gay adoption illegal.
- Politicians across Ukraine have been pushing the banning of “LGBT propaganda”.
- The chair of Ukraine’s parliament up to 2019 was the founder of a far-right party that incorporated Nazi ideology.
- The police routinely turn a blind eye to violent far-right attacks on LGBTQIA+ people.
To be clear, you cannot have a benign background level of far-right politics in your country. This ideology has real repercussions, including during times of war, leaving already vulnerable people in even more dire straits. At the moment, we are seeing black people turned back at the Polish-Ukrainian border, while whites pass through. Within Ukraine, South Asians have been denied transport out of the nation. Trans people are being left stranded in war-torn Ukraine. We cannot connect with the plight that all people face during a crisis such as Ukraine’s without also acknowledging the deep-seated roots of white supremacy in Europe.
I know that some people are saying that we can’t deal with these realities because it hands Russia too much ammunition. That there are bigger fish to fry, and so, criticising Ukraine or Poland’s far-right faction will have to wait for another day. But here’s the thing: suppression of minorities always relies on the argument that there are more important issues to tackle right now. The “ideal” time to recognise vulnerable peoples’ rights never arrives because, at any point in time, any society is going to be facing significant problems. So, this promise of some future liberation when it’s more convenient becomes a means to deny non-white rights just as much as any explicitly bigoted rejection of their humanity. It is easy to extend support to marginalised groups in times of relative stability (although western nations often don’t reach that low bar), but it’s when the pressure’s on that you really find which demographics people care about and which they don’t.
I want to repeat that Ukraine is not top to bottom Nazis; I know Russian propaganda propagates that myth, and I’m not saying that. I know there are plenty of Ukrainians who oppose the country’s right. But this is the thing: blanket support for or opposition against a country’s politics is difficult to justify because there are usually disagreements between the government and the people. In addition, you’ll find incongruity between different parts of the government and different corners of the citizenry. There will always be a mix of political opinions and actions in any part of the world.
The representation of Nazism in Ukraine has dovetailed with white supremacist rhetoric in the reporting of the conflict. The deputy chief prosecutor of Ukraine appeared on the BBC to claim that what’s sad about the crisis is that Europeans with blue eyes and blonde hair are dying. UK journalist Matthew Wright said, “The US has used [a thermobaric bomb] before in Afghanistan. But the idea of it being used in Europe is stomach-churning”. The thread I’ve linked contains plenty of other examples of racially discriminatory coverage. The mindset from too much of the western media is that war is the Middle East’s natural habitat. The tragedy is not that people are in desperation and anguish, but that that pain and suffering is happening in the unacceptable staging ground of a predominantly white country rather than the acceptable location of a predominantly non-white one.
In the current climate, you can see that the news outlets are capable of identifying the forced occupation of a country as a hostile act. They are able to frame regular people taking up arms within that context as heroic resistance fighters and not atavistic terrorists. The media just chooses not to apply this lens when the occupying force is the US, or a US proxy, and the defensive side is an enemy of the US.
I’ve seen both professional commentators and western bystanders express disbelief at the degree of suffering in this particular war. And the Russian military is acting with exceptional cruelty. But the death, the grief, the pain, the trauma; none of that is out of the ordinary for such an event. During their incursions into Arabic countries, the US and UK were successful at spreading a propagandistic vision of “clean” war where we mostly don’t have to think about the fallout of turning hometowns into battlefields.
Now, seeing the bare reality of armed conflict and its effects on human beings, we reflexively retreat into the safe idea that this is some extraordinary war rather than the inherent nature of such conflicts. This disbelief that western-involved war could be such a horrible thing may be why you’re now seeing a dangerous group of delusionals supporting moves that would lead us into a WWIII. Some outsiders rightfully recognise that the invasion of Ukraine is emotionally and morally intolerable but somehow think a Russia-NATO conflict, one that would quite probably be nuclear in nature, wouldn’t be so bad. Support for Zelenskyy in his repelling of Russia is noble. However, unconditional support for his political plans, in general, is woefully dangerous when he’d like to see the US directly engaging with the Russian military.
It’s not just non-white people who are hurt by this concept of war in the white country being special, either. It prevents sympathy with Ukrainians too. Through this racist and western-centric lens, the Ukrainians are not real people we should support because they have emotions, beliefs, loved ones, homes, and cultures. The only bit that the racists really care about is their skin colour, their location, or in some especially stupid cases, that they consume the same products as us. These elements alone do not make up a full human being.
And if the UK claims to care about Ukrainians, then they have to contend with the racism against Eastern Europeans, which was so prolific in the country in the past couple of decades. If the UK government authentically supports victims of war, then why would it have undergone the Brexit project, restricting the movement of refugees into the country, or be attempting to pass the Nationality and Borders Bill Why is it that Ukrainian war victims can only find refuge in the nation if they fit into one of a small set of state-defined boxes? Why must even the people who match those holes have to slice through so much red tape to reach British shores?
In what government sympathetic to refugees do you have even the liberal party opposing measures to offer Ukrainians asylum? If the Tory party are the cure to Russian oligarchy, then why have they taken tens of thousands in donations from Russian billionaires? The UK is now putting aside £120m for humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and that’s noteworthy. Still, to put it in perspective, that’s 0.01% of the country’s 2019–20 budget for the most drastic European humanitarian crisis of the 21st century so far.
And if you do care about the LGBTQIA+ people being stripped of civil liberties in Russia, don’t sanctions that destroy the economic security of an already vulnerable people only compound the state violence against them? For that matter, if we care about the liberties of all people and tip our cap to the Russian protestors opposing the war, as we seem to be doing, would it be good to materially ruin them by reducing the value of their currency to a fraction of the US penny? The citizenry did not start the war, but it is punished, nonetheless.
There are many positions here that we might call contradictory if we didn’t know better. The west condemns Russia’s oppressive treatment of its people, but is also happy to economically disempower the same people. Morally and through the transfer of arms, many western countries claim to support Ukraine even as they maintain walls to keep Ukrainian refugees from asylum. Nations condemn Russia’s anti-minority elements, but are happy to treat Ukraine in its totality as an unproblematic hero state. Of course, none of these are contradictions once you realise the throughline. In any given argument, western countries are just maintaining the position most convenient for holding onto power. They highlight the suffering of people when caused by an enemy, but not when they or an ally cause the pain. Ukrainians have the west’s unconditional support as soldiers with which to attack Russians, but should they turn up at the border, we don’t know them. Let’s hope that we can find more compassionate alternatives to this selfish and reductionist view of the world. Thanks for reading.
Please consider donating whatever you can to DEC’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.
