Racism at the Ukrainian Border

Was Ukrainian border policy an example of racism or chivalry?

Beata Zawrzel / Getty

The morning after Russia invaded Ukraine, ABC News published an article titled “Fears of a growing refugee crisis in Europe loom amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The refugee crisis that followed has since become one of the largest in human history, displacing slightly more than 9 million people. The others are World War II, which displaced 60 million, the Partition of India, which displaced 10 to 20 million, and World War I, which displaced 7 to 15 million. Those are the big four.

The ABC article included a prediction by Serena Parekh, professor of philosophy at Northeastern University whose research focuses on refugees. Parekh said there would probably be great sympathy for Ukrainian refugees partly because they were fleeing a common enemy and because they are white, mostly Christian and European.

Months later, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a native of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region and the director-general of the World Health Organization, made international headlines when he claimed racism was the reason people cared more about Ukraine than the war in Tigray. I disagreed on Twitter, citing the nuclear threat, disruption to global wheat supplies and the fact that most news outlets reporting on Ukraine are based in Europe or North America and so they are more likely to care about a war that directly affects them. Tedros gave me a call, we debated the topic and he convinced me that racism may not be the cause, but it certainly had to be added to the list.

I ended up writing a report on the subject for The Nation. I also wrote about Tigray for Foreign Policy and later conducted investigative research on the subject, which included a series of interviews with Tigrayan survivors of genocidal violence and genocidal rape, and some of those interviews reinforced the truth of what Tedros had told me. But it’s a complicated truth, and it often gets oversimplified in news reports.

For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, stories immediately emerged that people of color were being turned back by Ukrainian border guards out of sheer racism. On February 26, Fair Planet published a report titled “Ukraine’s Humanitarian Crisis Exposes Racist Divides.” Here’s an example of the racism:

Upon reaching the border, Indian students have reported that Ukrainian military and police are pushing, beating and firing shots into the air in order to prevent groups of foreign citizens from leaving Ukraine and are prioritizing the evacuation of Ukrainians.

But there is not enough information given for the reader to determine why Ukrainian officials would behave this way, whether they were behaving this way to different groups of people or if there was any pattern to the behavior. More on that below.

Two days later, on February 28, CNN published an article with a headline that noted “Racism at the Border” about two female medical students, one African and one Indian, who left Lviv but were stopped at the Shehyni crossing into Poland, along with other foreigners, while Ukrainians were allowed to proceed. They had to make their way on foot, but eventually got through.

AP News reported two Indian men at a refugee camp in Bucharest said Ukrainian border guards were giving priority to Ukrainian refugees and that in some instances, they even physically pushed non-Ukrainians back.

NBC News reported these events too, in a piece titled “‘Open the door or we die’: Africans report racism and hostility trying to flee Ukraine.” Here is an excerpt:

Videos on social media have shown officials appearing to threaten to shoot groups of African students, a woman shielding an infant from the cold, officials chasing groups of people and people reported to be stranded in Ukraine. Representatives from several African countries—Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Gabon—have condemned the reports, and the African Union said Monday that it was disturbed by the news.

Twitter users began using the hashtag #AfricansInUkraine to raise awareness about the problem. An international coalition of civil rights lawyers filed an appeal to the United Nations on behalf of African refugees facing racism at the border. The group included Ben Crump, attorney for the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, and Jasmine Rand, attorney for the families of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.

“As long as you are Black, no one likes you,” said Ethel Ansaeh Otto, a student from Ghana trying flee Ukraine. “Mostly, they would consider white people first. White people first, Indian people, Arabic people, before Black people.”

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When Russia first attacked and refugees began pouring over the border into Poland, I jumped on a flight and made my way to the border. I initially planned to go through Lviv into Kyiv and then head east to the front lines to cover the fighting directly.

But I quickly decided to focus instead on the human stories of the refugees rather than the fighting itself. I also have a healthy aversion to being killed. So I did get a chance to discuss some of these claims with refugees as they came over into Poland.

I recently remarked on X that I was disappointed to see The Daily Beast publish an article by a news intern about my firing from The Seattle Times. Not because the intern failed to reach out for comment, although we follow each other on X so that would have been all too easy, nor because of the article’s graceless handling of my argument regarding Lenin.

Rather, it was because the article ends by noting some of my work has been published in “New York magazine, The Nation and The Daily Beast.”

The article should have mentioned what my work for The Daily Beast included, such as one report in which I outline misconceptions about the war in Ukraine and note that Russia is a fascist state, or one in which I examine Russia’s claim about de-Nazifying Ukraine, making clear my views on Nazism and antisemitism. All extremely relevant if one is writing for the same outlet about a scandal involving folks calling me a Nazi.

Looking back at those pieces, I found the following passage on the cutting room floor. An editing cut that was originally included in the report on misconceptions. So here’s one more piece of misinformation not included in the published piece.

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Reports say people of color are being pushed to the back of border lines due to racism. I didn’t see any examples of this at the border myself, but I have no doubt it is happening. However, as is often the case, there’s more to the story.

I reached out to the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service (SBGS) to see what they had to say about such reports.

“There are no restrictions on the departure of foreign men from Ukraine,” the SBGS told me. “And there is no discrimination against persons on racial grounds. But priority was given to women with children [...] and persons with disabilities.”

This might sound like boiler-plate denial, and I probably might have taken it as such myself, except it tracks with multiple eye-witness accounts I’ve received from Ukrainian refugees. One Ukrainian refugee I spoke to mentioned foreign men pushing ahead of lines, being subsequently removed from those lines and sent to the back, and then accusing the guards of racism as a result.

Another Ukrainian refugee told me a similar story. I can’t comment on the frequency of such incidents or what proportion of the total are the result of racism as opposed to situations like this, but it is worth noting that none of the news reports that cite racism as the cause make any attempt to quantify its frequency, nor do they mention line-cutting or variations on the Birkenhead drill.

In other words, people are being pushed to the back of lines, sometimes due to racism, sometimes not due to racism, and we don’t know how often racism is a factor.

Something else I almost didn’t even spot is the fact that many of the stories of racism have come from men. In fact, a few articles I read reporting allegations of racism at the border rely entirely on testimonies from men. I thought nothing of this at first, until I spoke to several more Ukrainian refugees.

“The men, they are always complaining that we Ukrainians are racist because we don’t allow them to go to the trains,” Mariia Bilenka told me, a refugee from Kyiv. “But actually, no men were allowed to go to the trains. The evacuation was made for women and children, so it didn’t matter the nationality of the men.”

This echoes what the SBGS had to say. Namely, that “priority was given to women with children.” This is a classic code of conduct during evacuations, especially marine disasters, known as the Birkenhead drill. The name comes from the evacuation of one of the Royal Navy’s first iron-hulled ships, the HMS Birkenhead, in 1852. It is estimated that of the 640 people aboard, only 193 were saved including seven women, 13 children and eight horses. None of the senior naval officers survived, as they were all ordered either to man the water pumps or lower the lifeboats. Rudyard Kipling later honored their chivalry in his 1893 poem “Soldier an’ Sailor Too.”

To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you've cover to 'and, an' leave an' likin' to shout;
But to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,
An' they done it, the Jollies – 'Er Majesty's Jollies – soldier an' sailor too!

The ship wrecked in less than 100 feet of water off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa, and to this day locals there refer to Great White sharks as “Tommy sharks,” after the Tommys (slang for a British soldier) who were taken away by them at night. Reading about this, I’m struck by the mental image of horses swimming through the dark sea as a giant ship tips into the waves and sharks devour the men.

The other famous example of the Birkenhead drill is, of course, during the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Captain Edward Smith gave the order and one of his officers put women and children into lifeboats first. But another officer interpreted the order to mean women and children only and some lifeboats were therefore sent down with empty seats simply because there were no women waiting to board. As a result, over 70% of the women on the Titanic were saved but only 20% of the men.

One may consider “women and children first” a basic virtue, an outdated artifact of Edwardian chivalry, or a vicious example of the expendable male hypothesis. Whatever the case, it has nothing to do with racism and, if anything, more to do with sexism.

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None of this is to say that racism was not a cause at the Ukrainian border and even though racism may not be the cause, it certainly must be added to the list.

One of the more striking claims I heard about racism at the border came from the NBC News report quoted above, which said, “videos on social media have shown officials appearing to threaten to shoot groups of African students.”

I tracked down the person who filmed that video, Alexander Somto Orah of Nigeria, the editor of the news outlet Nzeora. He goes by Nzekiev on X, or just Nze.

“They said the train is for women and children,” Nze told me, “but Black women and Black children weren’t allowed to board the train until there was an outrage from Africans.”

I told Nze I had also heard from one Ukrainian who said the rule was that only women and children could cross, but this was not communicated very well and there was confusion about it. I asked him what he thought about this.

“The Ukrainian is a liar,” said Nze, “and that’s because she doesn’t know what went on due to her being Ukrainian and white.”

I had not told Nze that the Ukrainian was female or white.

“Obviously,” he added, “they were allowed to go. Without my videos, the extreme racism at the stations and border would’ve been hidden.”

Evidence like his should be added to the list. The problem is, looking at most of the news reports on the matter, there was no list. There was no questioning. There was a claim of racism and little effort made to mine whatever nuanced truth it carried. It’s almost as if, for some news outlets, the claim alone was evidence.

“I have already read lots of articles about foreign students, Africans or Middle Easterners saying Ukrainians are so racist,” Bilenka told me. “But they had to read the rules about evacuation. There are Ukrainians who behave like that too. It’s not about racism. It’s about human behavior.”