Humanity always operates at its basest level during wartime. There’s something about the proximity of death that turns many combatants and civilians into the worst versions of themselves.
Many soldiers will do the formerly unthinkable in exchange for a few more days, hours or minutes of life. Taking their cues from soldiers, some refugees will cast off a lifetime of morality as they flee an oppressor determined to grind their bones into dust: “I may be damned, but at least I’m not a Roma, or a woman or Black,” they say as crude hierarchies assert themselves. “I still have just enough status not to be thrown off the train first.”
A month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the feel-good stories about the indomitability of ordinary Ukrainians have become the settled narrative in Western media.
Footage of atrocities caused by Russian missile attacks document the daily toll on Ukrainians. Even if Vladimir Putin is able to retain power after his Potemkin army returns home humiliated, he will be held in as much contempt internationally as the dictator of North Korea.
Meanwhile, win or lose, alive or dead when this drama ends, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be forever synonymous with heroism unprecedented for leaders in this era.
So far, Zelenskyy has shamed Sweden, Norway and Denmark into abandoning decades of neutrality to send weapons to his country; Germany has increased its defense budget and killed its natural gas pipeline deal with Russia despite the economic hardship it will cause Germans.
Zelenskyy also rebuked Israel for attempting to remain friendly with Russia during an occupation and siege that threatens Ukrainian Jewry along with every other community. He’s demanded weapons and an “iron dome” like Israel’s over Ukraine.
After a joint session of Congress, Zelenskyy even managed to corral the isolationist GOP into backing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, while President Joe Biden resists calls for military intervention out of fear that shooting down Russian planes just might be the spark World War III needs.
Because Zelenskyy has been so outspoken about so many things in his newly minted role as Europe’s moral conscience, I assumed it would be relatively simple to find his condemnation of the appalling mistreatment of Black Ukrainians, African students and other refugees of color by Ukrainian soldiers and security personnel.
The terrible treatment of non-white Ukrainians during the earliest days of the invasion is well-documented, so there’s no debate about whether it is Russian disinformation or not. Male African students were removed from trains and buses and told to walk while Black women were mostly allowed to stay, but denied food, water and other necessities that went to white Ukrainians.
What crime had these African students, workers and Black Ukrainians committed to receive such disparate treatment? Like their white counterparts trying to get to the borders of neighboring countries, they wanted to live. They wanted to get their children out of the country and to safety. Many simply wanted to get back to their country of origin.
Those born in Ukraine who had never lived anywhere else were mourning the invasion of their country by a hostile power that has never taken racial equality seriously except as a point of rhetoric. It is an awkward time to discover that being Black makes someone a second-class citizen in Ukraine, even as Russian propaganda describes the invasion as a limited military operation to “denazify” the country.
Surely, Zelenskyy had addressed the bigotry of Ukrainian soldiers separating families at train stations and discriminating against refugees on the basis of their appearance. That was my assumption when I began scouring the web for Zelenskyy’s criticism of his countrymen. The stories of beatings and unfair treatment of non-white refugees must have gotten back to him, even at his various undisclosed locations.
Imagine my surprise to find nothing of the sort from Zelenskyy, a month into this stupid, terrible war. I’m sure there are many who will rush to his defense to ridicule the notion that racism and the humiliation of racial and ethnic minorities rates more than a shrug amid the outrage of a country being pulverized by Russian missiles.
The man who is frequently described as the most eloquent European leader since Churchill, and who routinely invokes the memory of the Holocaust when he chides NATO and Israel for inaction, has not addressed a glaring contradiction in his fairy-tale narrative – even when African leaders point out the discrepancy.
Fortunately, people who don’t suffer from Zelenskyy’s particular myopia on this issue have rallied to help African students get out of Ukraine alive, and with their dignity mostly intact.
Grassroots groups like Black Women for Black Lives and Black Foreigners in Ukraine have assembled digital resources, donations and much-needed aid for African students and refugees. Red Cross buses have been sent to ferry hundreds of African students stranded in Sumy, Ukraine, to safety in bordering countries with the mission of getting them back to their home countries.
Meanwhile, the war goes on and Zelenskyy is justifiably celebrated as the best leader Ukraine could possibly have at a time like this. For a leader who was a bit player in the first Trump impeachment and widely considered a political novice, he outshines every other world leader right now, which is to damn him with faint praise.
Perhaps Zelenskyy has addressed the bigotry of his compatriots and it simply hasn’t been picked up by the white-centering Western news media. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is some perfunctory statement about Ukrainian racism buried in some document somewhere, but that’s not the same as a full-throated call to the people to rise to a moment that doesn’t require Molotov cocktails or grandmothers wielding AK-47s. All it requires is compassion for the “stranger in one’s midst.”
That by itself would establish a more persuasive contrast to the morality of the barbarians currently at the gates.
By Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit at post-gazette.com.
