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The Russian invasion of Ukraine, regarded as the biggest conflict Europe has seen since World War II, has inspired a wave of solidarity across the globe for the Ukrainian people fighting against illegal military occupation. But for many of us, it has been difficult to ignore the racial bias in the media’s coverage of the conflict, particularly the ways that journalists are comparing it to conflicts in the Middle East.

At the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge that we can criticize the ways that Ukrainian lives are being portrayed as more valuable than Middle Eastern, black, and brown lives, while sympathizing with them, recognizing that hundreds of Ukrainians have been killed so far during the invasion, and half a million have crossed into neighboring countries. These are not mutually exclusive. War is war. 

A long-standing double standard has been exposed, as Western media dehumanizes non-White populations, implying that it’s much more severe when White Europeans suffer because Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African people are, well, used to it, as they are “developing third world countries” and have “seen conflict raging for decades.” Here are several examples of the dangerous bias we are seeing in the media when it came to reporting on the war in Ukraine. As journalists, we cannot filter suffering based on race or nationality. We must do better.