What are some components of the invasion of Ukraine I may have missed?
Looking at the Africans and Asians facing rampant discrimination at the border, the caveats to Swiss "neutrality" and criticisms of the Western media gaze.
Welcome to the 67th issue of The Supplement, a newsletter that fills in the gaps of your other news intake. This is Sam, one-third of The Supplement team!
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This week, we’re tackling this question: What are some components of the invasion of Ukraine I may have missed?
TL;DR: There are a lot of nuances surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine that you should be paying attention to. Africans and Asians are struggling to leave the country and facing rampant discrimination at the border. All is not as it seems when it comes to Switzerland and its neutrality. And as per usual, Western media organizations are showing their deep racist and nationalist biases in their coverage of war and conflict.
I’m sure you’re already being inundated with news about the nuts and bolts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — and the situation is quickly evolving. So this week, we decided to tackle a few nuanced questions about what’s been happening recently and aspects of the conflict you might have not engaged with yet.
Do you have additional questions or comments about the coverage of Ukraine? Feel free to shoot us an email thesupplementnewsletter@gmail.com or DM’ing us on Instagram.
Why are some people having a harder time leaving the country?
Of the more than 660,000 people that have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded, Africans and Asians have reportedly been facing the hardest time at the border, fuelled by rampant discrimination. Videos and photos emerged across social media platforms about this late last week. The Ukrainian foreign minister has said that all foreigners should be allowed to leave, and the Polish government echoed that they have no restrictions. In other words, there’s no official reason that certain people should be getting turned away on either side.
BBC reporter Stephanie Hegarty has been diligently reporting on and verifying the issue, confirming that some border guards have been saying “they need to let ‘Ukrainians’ through first.”
The racism is especially impacting international students. There are over 16,000 students in Ukraine from Morocco, Nigeria and Egypt, according to additional reporting about some of these students from Reuters. And thousands of Indian students — who make up about the largest share of foreign students in Ukraine with 76,000 students, according to Ukrainian government data — are also trying to flee and facing difficulties.
On Monday, the African Union released a statement decrying the situation: “Reports that Africans are singled out for unacceptable dissimilar treatment would be shockingly racist and in breach [of] international law.” Black communities from around the world have chimed in to share their support.
The Indian government has been heavily criticized for how it has handled the evacuation of its citizens, but has stepped up efforts after a medical student named Naveen Shekharappa was killed in Kharkiv.
One last quick note on this: the normal rules for refugees have been lifted to let Ukrainians settle where they want in the EU — a method that hasn’t been used for other conflicts. See this clip:
Why is this conflict being covered so much differently?
On a related note, the media has been treating this conflict vastly differently than those in countries with predominantly non-white populations. Shock, dismay, and empathy characterize news conversations about Ukraine in a way that they simply don’t when it comes to the Middle East. One foreign correspondent in Kyiv commented that Ukraine was different from situations in “Iraq and Afghanistan that have seen conflict raging for decades” because it’s a “civilized” and “European” country.
Journalists Medhi Hasan and Ayman Mohyeldin broke this down excellently on The Medhi Hasan Show on MSNBC:
And here are a few other important tweets making the rounds:
What’s going on with Switzerland?
You may have seen reports of Switzerland breaking its famous, centuries-long neutrality late last week to impose sanctions on Russia alongside many other countries that had already done so. (Following similar actions from the European Union and the US, the country held off for days of hesitation.)
But there’s a much larger story to understand about why Switzerland chose to take action on Russia now and how its “neutral” stance has let it bow out of culpability in the past. For more, this podcast from The Guardian digs into the nefarious side of Swiss banking. It’s absolutely worth the full listen, but in short, Credit Suisse has provided services to known criminals and fraudsters for decades, according to a recent data leak — including Russians.
What if I’m just tired of reading the news? What if I’m just trying to keep up with the basic facts, and all these additional angles and events are exhausting?
This point from journalist Vincent Bevins is maybe my favourite perspective to come out of this whole mess. “We can care about the whole world,” he wrote.
So much information competes for our attention these days, some of it objectively more important than other things. Stay engaged as much as you can, take breaks but don’t completely check out of the world, and keep empathy and knowledge-building at the forefront of your news consumption.
Here’s someone to follow:
More of an international recommendation from me today! Eliot Higgins founded Bellingcat, “an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation,” in 2014. Their work has only gotten better since, most recently covering staged pro-Russia propaganda.
Here’s a story to check out:
Lasqueti Island is a 400-person community off the east coast of Vancouver Island that made headlines for its deeply divided response to mask and vaccine mandates. Capital Daily journalist Brishti Basu stitched together what that really looks like on the ground — and it’s a fascinating story.