President Vladimir Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine was nasty indeed and can’t be explained away. There is absolutely no justification for the agony and exile inflicted on the Ukrainian people, still less for the loss of human lives that we can see every day on our screens. War is always ugly and attacks on sovereign states have to be condemned unconditionally. 

There is however a silver lining to this tragedy.

The suffering of the Ukrainian people attracted an unprecedented wave of sympathy, and initiatives of organising donations for Ukrainian refugees have sprouted in many parts of the world, attracting endless queues of people of all creed and colour. These were combined with calls for opening up borders to Ukrainian refugees and many people – again of different ethnicities and religious affiliations – offering their homes to shelter them. It is a beautiful chapter that can hardly be explained.

It can’t be explained by the fact that the war is in Europe. There is nothing new about that. There have been more wars in Europe alone than on any other continent on the planet. This is a historical fact, not a value judgement. From the Vikings to the Huns, going through the two world wars. It cannot be because NATO is a righteous organisation always fighting the right causes. The world hasn’t been struck by a happy attack of amnesia obliterating memories of a Gaza that has been an open prison for decades without eliciting any emotions, Yemen, where children are dying on a daily basis, the “military intervention” in Libya and the invasion of Iraq on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

But the world was happy to accept NATO as a virtuous organisation righting the wrongs caused by Putin. And President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shot from a “dispiritingly mediocre” politician in a corrupt state – ranked 60th out of 100 by Freedom House 2021 report – to an unlikely war hero overnight. 

Sadly, this happy chapter didn’t last long. Very quickly, we found out that country borders were not open to all refugees in the same way. The African Union had to issue a communiqué denouncing the ill-treatment of Africans trying to leave Ukraine as these “are being refused the right to cross the border to safety”. This is absolutely shocking! That even in these desperate times when the world is united in sympathy, safety is a luxury denied to people on the basis of their race!

As if this bad news weren’t enough, some interventions on the BBC really took the cake. They ranged from the Boris Johnsons of this world, who stated that this war is disturbing because it is happening “on our doorstep” to those who are concerned that the war is “happening in a civilised part of the world” (Read not in a s..thole country) and culminating in the BBC ‘analyst’, who stated that he felt really sorry for the people suffering in Ukraine “because they are like us; they have blue eyes and blonde hair”! These insensitive comments brought a morbid edge to a chapter of hope that had started opening.

I hope the gravity of the situation we are going through, where megalomaniacal and imperialistic ambitions and obsessions on both sides are putting the safety of the whole world at risk, will help us come to the realisation that we are in this together. That we will win it together or lose it together. Those with blonde hair and blue eyes are not the only humans who experience suffering nor are they the only ones mobilised to help those in distress. I hope we manage to realise that if this conflict escalates into a nuclear war, we will be in a situation where, as Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said: “The living will envy the dead.” I doubt that the colour of one’s hair or eyes will matter then.