Black in Ukraine: Unequal Treatment While Fleeing War

Archival Recording: It was unprovoked, but this is what Russian president Vladimir Putin unleashed on Ukraine as the sun came up this morning: a missile striking an industrial park in western Ukraine; a helicopter assault on an airport outside of Kyiv. Close, intense fighting. And there are civilian casualties. Local officials say this apartment building was struck...

Eniola Oladiti: That was 24th, yeah, 24th of February. They were attacking the trains all morning, yeah. And the stage was too late for people in Sumy to do anything.

Trymaine Lee: Eniola Oladiti is a 26-year-old Irish citizen, born in Nigeria. She'd been studying medicine in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, near the border with Russia, since 2019. Eni, as her friends call her, enjoyed going to school in Sumy. But then Russia invaded Ukraine. The two countries went to war and everything changed.

Oladiti: I remember getting a phone call from my Ukrainian friend saying, "Oh my god, it's happening."

Lee: Eni lived alone in a two bedroom apartment in Sumy.

Oladiti: I remember looking out the window. Airspace was closed, so I was like, "Oh my god, I can't go to Ireland. My goodness." So I was, like, all eyes. Looked out the window, people were running up and down. There was queues at the ATM, queues at the pharmacy, queues at shopping centers.

Lee: Eni knew that she had to get out of town, but it wasn't gonna be easy.

Oladiti: Train station, buses, taxis weren't running. I went to the train station, absolutely packed, no movement whatsoever. People were just runnin' up and down with suitcases, and no one was even anywhere. Then as of the next day then, that was when the line was blown. Things stopped moving in Sumy. We were completely cut off, completely cut off from being able to go anywhere. So that's how a lotta students ended up being stranded in Sumy.

Lee: Ukraine has long attracted foreign students to its universities because of affordable tuition and a cheap cost of living for a European country. Before the war broke out, there were around 76,000 foreign students in the country. According to the BBC, almost a quarter of them are from Africa. Many others are Black Europeans, just like Eni. And suddenly many were stuck, miles away from home, in a war zone.

Archival Recording: Back in Sumy, in Ukraine, there are students, thousands of them, trapped. All the bridges have been destroyed by bombs and every, so they can't move.

Lee: As the situation in Sumy grew more tense over the last couple weeks, Eni moved into a nearby dorm for international students where she felt safer. But the dorm quickly became overcrowded.

Oladiti: Well, you know, students are sharing quite a small space, kitchen, shared rooms, bathrooms and all this kinda stuff. Now you're talking about not being water to flush the toilet. Then there was alarms going off when there was shellings and explosion and gunshots that we could see and we could hear.

And then we'd be runnin' to the bomb shelters, the bunkers. You know, it's not a situation that anyone should be in, really. I mean, there were nights that I was, literally I'd fall asleep in my jacket and my shoes because you don't wanna be looking for a jacket when everyone's runnin' down and going to the bunker, with no electricity.

So it was just I always had my bag ready. I had-- a small backpack with my passport and just little essentials that I'd always just carry to the bunker with me. And there were times where you'd be running to the bunkers. There's so much of us running. There were people fainted. Just yeah.

Lee: Finally, Eni had enough. She had to get to the nearest place where there was still train service heading away from the fighting, a city south of Sumy called Poltava. But without trains or buses, and the few taxis that were running charging more than 20 times the normal rate, she needed a way out. So she turned to her landlady, the one who'd been renting her that two bedroom apartment.

Oladiti: I have a good relationship with my landlady. Turns out her boyfriend has a car.

Lee: The landlady and her boyfriend agree to drive Eni to Poltava. They left on Monday, March 7th, a week and a half after the war started. It was a harrowing five hour trip.

Oladiti: The Ukraine Army on the way told us to turn back, it wasn't safe. They'd gotten messages about Russian troops being on the way and they're not sure which route. So there was many things, and they wanted to give up. But I remember looking into my (UNINTEL) bag and (UNINTEL) bag and I was ready to take the risk. And I could not bear to stay here anymore.

Lee: The car finally made it to the train station in Poltava. Eni said goodbye to her landlady and waited for a train to take her west to Lviv.

Oladiti: Ended up staying there for I'd say about five hours. After the train came that took 13 to 14 hours standing on the train. Very packed train.

Lee: Eni says Lviv was calmer, and some of her fellow students decided to wait for a train, but she got on the first bus heading to the border that she could find.

Oladiti: I did not want to stop, because that's the whole reason I got caught in this situation. So (LAUGH) I was just desperate to get out by all means.

Lee: After the bus ride, and then a private taxi, Eni made it to the border with Hungary. The journey from Sumy had taken more than two full days.

Oladiti: They were very welcoming. They had hot food. They had tea, hot meals, drinking soup, that kinda stuff.

Lee: Eni then took another train to Budapest, where she was finally able to get a hot shower and some rest. And that's where she called us from.

Oladiti: I'm in a country now where I feel safe, and I'm making my way home. And I'm just, I'm able to do things myself. And I'm just, yeah, I'm just grateful to be alive and thankful to be among the lucky ones that made it out with all body parts in place.

Lee: Eni passed through Ukraine and the border without getting stopped or harassed. But there are many more who haven't been so lucky.

Tiffany Cross: Thousands of these students have attempted to flee to safety only to be caught in the grips of racism.

Lee: The first week of March, MSNBC's Tiffany Cross spoke to one of these students, Alexander, who said Ukrainians were not allowing him or his fellow African students on the trains out of the country.

Alexander: The train was going to Warsaw. I and my friends get on. They called the police on us and told us to get out of the train. And when I asked them why, they said the train is mostly for Ukrainians.

Lee: Alexander told Tiffany that officials were checking the passports of anyone who was not white and stopping the people who weren't Ukrainians. There have been other videos of Black people beaten off of trains and buses to make room for native white Ukrainians, and reports of Black people held at the borders, even as white people were allowed to pass.

Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon: You see these images and these videos, and you're, like, in the middle of a war zone there's still anti-Black racism. But unfortunately that didn't surprise me.

Lee: I'm Trymaine Lee, and this is Into America. With the war in Ukraine entering its fourth week, many are watching with fear and concern. And for Black Americans, there's the added tension of worrying and wondering about Black people in Ukraine in particular, the ones being dragged off trains or blocked at the border.

Because even a war zone, the violence of white supremacy never stops. Today we're looking at what it means to be Black in Ukraine, how America's anti-Black racism has influenced the region, and the complicated history of race in Eastern Europe.

St. Julian-Varnon: My friends in Ukraine are in bunkers. My colleagues in Ukraine, their families, are being bombed. And I've been talking to students, foreign students in Ukraine, and keeping up with them. I check on them every day.

Lee: Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is an expert in Russian and Ukrainian history, focusing on race and Blackness, as a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She used to live in Ukraine, and as the war broke out she helped start an informal network of academics and volunteers who are trying to get good and reliable information to people on the ground.

St. Julian-Varnon: It's been like a whisper network, really. It's been people who live in Ukraine, students who saw my Twitter and they got in contact with me. That's just utilizing the connections I have in Ukraine, on the ground. Someone who has a sister in Kharkiv, she knows a guy who has a car. And so it's just been a really fascinating community effort.

Lee: Kimberly was the one who connected us with Eni. One of Kimberly's contacts knew some of the students that Eni had been traveling with from Sumy. Kimberly has been focusing her efforts there, in Sumy, where thousands of Black students like Eni have been trapped.

St. Julian-Varnon: "Hey, do you have anyone on the ground who's within, like, 30 miles of Sumy?" And usually there's, like, a small group of volunteers and they're Indian students who live outside of Sumy, and they've been able to kinda get goods together and bring them in. So that's been the big thing I've been doing, is just trying to locate resources and connect people on the ground. But it has been very difficult.

Lee: There's a long and rich history of Black students studying in Ukraine. In fact, Kimberly has been one of them. But not for medical school or engineering, she was there to study Ukraine itself. Kimberly grew up in rural Texas. She's 32 now. But she first got interested in Eastern Europe when she was just a little kid. One day in the fifth grade, she was sick and stayed home from school.

St. Julian-Varnon: And my mom was like, "Well, you're sick, so you're not gonna go outside and play." So I watched an eight hour miniseries called Russia, Land of the Tsars. And I was like, "Okay, Russia is this really cool place." Since then I've just been, like, fascinated with this region and it's been my life's work. And my focus on race comes from being Black in Ukraine. (LAUGH)

Lee: Kimberly actually traces her focus on Blackness in Ukraine to one memorable moment.

St. Julian-Varnon: I was doing research for my master's thesis in Kyiv, Ukraine and Odessa, Ukraine in 2013. And I was walking across Khreshchatyk, which is, like, the main street in Kyiv. And I was walking from the Metro and walking towards the Metro was a Black woman.

And, like, we just stopped and looked at each other, and then we just ran up and hugged each other. And I was like, "What are you doing here?" And she was like, "What are you doing here?" (LAUGH) And I said, "Well, I'm a student. I'm doing research." And she said, "I'm Ukrainian." And I was like, "What do you mean, you're Ukrainian?" And that was how I learned about Black Ukrainians. It was because I literally ran into one on the street.

Lee: Wow.

St. Julian-Varnon: And since then I've been trying to figure out what is the Black diaspora here? What is it like being here?

Lee: Kimberly's research on race in this part of the world took her back to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and '30s.

St. Julian-Varnon: So the Soviet Union during this period, it's under Stalin, and they're beginning the Five-Year Plans, so the mass industrialization in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has a problem, they don't have enough specialized workers to actually do this industrialization.

On the flip side, in the United States, it's the Great Depression and Jim Crow. And so what the Soviets do, and this starts under Lenin, before Stalin, they take advantage of that. They make anti-racist propaganda. They show and talk about the Scottsboro Boys a lot, so the group of nine boys in the South who were accused of assaulting a white woman, and they were all facing the death penalty.

The Soviets use things like this and use it as propaganda both inside the Soviet Union to show how terrible the United States is, but also to recruit African American workers and specialists because they need them. And they recruited, you know, dozen of African American specialists.

The cotton that was growing in Uzbekistan in the Soviet period, that's because of Tuskegee agricultural supports from the Tuskegee Institute. So we are here. African Americans are here. We're (LAUGH) in the Soviet Union. We're in Soviet Central Asia. Langston Hughes is probably the most famous of the Black visitors to the Soviet Union, but Black women are there. And, like, I'm working on a project now to talk about Black women in the Soviet Union.

Lee: These Black luminaries, like Langston Hughes, would usually stay in Moscow when they visited the Soviet Union. But sometimes they'd make a trip down to Ukraine.

St. Julian-Varnon: For a lot of African Americans Ukraine is where you go hang out. It's a great vacation spot. Like, literally the worst parts of Ukraine right now in terms of the bombing, on the cost of the Black Sea, were some of the best vacation spots. And there's this great story, Homer Smith, he's an African American journalist, he's in the Soviet Union in the '20s and '30s.

He actually lives there for 14 years. And he wrote a story for Abbott's Monthly, it was an African American magazine. And it's talking about how they're all hanging out, and I think they're in Odessa. They're on the sea. They're all at the beach.

And this white couple comes up to them, and they're an American white couple, and they're like, "You can't be here. You can't be on this beach, this is for whites only." And the, you know, the Soviet police officer was like, "I'm sorry, but this beach is for everyone. And if you don't wanna be around Black people, then you can't be on this beach." And Homer Smith, he said, "And reader, I enjoyed their despair with such grace." (LAUGHTER) Like, he just, he loves it.

Lee: After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Kimberly says that the Soviet Union became less interested in recruiting and attracting African Americans.

St. Julian-Varnon: Around 1957, under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union kind of leaves African Americans alone and focuses on Africa, which is decolonizing. So this is when you see a shift in the propaganda. It's more focused on anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism.

But they do take images from America, and you see a lotta pictures of, you know, the Civil Rights Movement, them opening water hoses and siccing dogs on protesters, the Soviet Union literally just took pictures made in the United States and sent them in propaganda posters to Africa.

And they were saying, "Which side do you wanna be on? Do you wanna be with us, you know, who allows your students to come here and you live here and you're safe? Or do you wanna be in the United States? Do you wanna ally with the United States?"

And it's really in the '60s where you see the Soviets actively recruiting African students. There were thousands of African students that go to Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. But after the '80s really is when the numbers start decreasing, because I mean, the Soviet economy is struggling.

Lee: Kimberly says that economic downturn helped spur a growing resentment among white Soviet citizens toward the Black students.

St. Julian-Varnon: And African students, a lotta people don't know this, African students actually had a lotta privileges in the Soviet Union. They could travel outside of the Soviet Union, which most Soviet people couldn't. They didn't have passports that allowed them to do that.

They got better food. They got to go to the foreign cafeterias. They got to go to foreign stores. So Africans, and not just Africans, but foreign students had extreme privileges in the Soviet Union that regular Soviet citizens didn't have.

That all changes after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those privileges are gone. So I think that's a key break in how African students and minority students are treated, and that's when you see more of this animosity towards Black and brown foreign students.

Lee: But those Black and foreign students are still coming though?

St. Julian-Varnon: Yes, they still are coming. There are thousands of them, and many of them are permanent residents of Ukraine. And this is why when people ask me why I care about Ukraine, because I know people who look like me live in Ukraine. You know, they work in Ukraine.

And so they still come. And despite issues of racism, much like in America, I see this really weird thing where people are like, "Well, if you know they're racist, why are you there?" Like, there's no place on earth we can go (LAUGH) that we're free from racism. I mean, I was in Oxford, England studying abroad. And on my third day there I had teenagers roll down the window and start calling me the N-word, in Oxford, England.

Lee: Wow.

St. Julian-Varnon: So you can't fault these African students for getting a really good education in a place that is, you know, is, in many ways, it's safe for them, right? So, like, everywhere we go you have this problem. But in Ukraine, there are already these preexisting communities that they can plug into that are really helpful. So I think there are a lotta benefits that people don't see when they think about why these students are here in the first place, and that Ukraine isn't all bad all the time.

Lee: When we come back, the rise of white supremacy and anti-Blackness in Eastern Europe, and what that's meant for America. Stick with us.

Lee: When Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon was studying in Ukraine in 2013, there was one terrifying moment in a Metro station that almost forced her to abandon her research.

St. Julian-Varnon: One day I was leaving the archives and I was going back to my hostel. I ran into a group of skinheads. That was one of the most terrifying things that have ever happened to me. It was me and, like, a group of five men. And I got really lucky.

Like, there was a group of police officers and I kinda ran behind them and ran out of the Metro, and I ran the entire way back to my hostel. And I remember, I was like, "I'm never, like, I'm never leaving this place again. Like, I can't go back outside."

Lee: Wow.

St. Julian-Varnon: But it was hair-raising, and it was when I really realized that to do my research I have to put myself in physical and emotional danger.

Lee: Even when Kimberly didn't feel she was in direct danger, living as a Black person in Kyiv was exhausting.

St. Julian-Varnon: And it was other things like I get on the train and literally everyone turns around and stares at me. (LAUGH) People walking across the street, they're taking pictures. It's hard. And I think that unless you've been the only visible minority in the place, a lotta people don't understand.

But then again, many of us who are Black and brown do understand, because we're the only person who looks like us. But in Eastern Europe, it's another level, because so often people have never seen someone that looks like you in real life.

Lee: You know, in a very American context, we broadly are understanding more about how whiteness operates. And some of us use that language, but I think more and more people are understanding white privilege, and the way these racial dynamics historically have played out in this country.

But how does whiteness, and Blackness for that matter, operate in a Ukrainian sense? Is it very similar? Obviously some of the racism is racism, and white supremacy is white supremacy. But does it kind of bounce around in a different way in Eastern Europe?

St. Julian-Varnon: Yes. This is my work. (LAUGH) And I started realizing this because I was Black in Eastern Europe, and I started to kind of see there is a hierarchy. There's a proximity to whiteness in Europe. In Western Europe, you know, Britain, France, Germany, they're at the top of that hierarchy, including the United States.

These are the people who have the most whiteness. They own whiteness. And what happens is, as you go further east, you start seeing the deterioration of that proximity to whiteness. Ukrainians, Poles are, you know, near the bottom. And this isn't including Southern Europeans from the Balkans, like Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, that's a little bit different.

But what you do see is you see, like, these little comments, especially during Brexit, about not wanting Eastern Europeans overrunning the borders. Like, why countries like Ukraine aren't ready to join the E.U., they're not Western enough. Or, like, one of those journalists said "relatively civilized", right? Like, those terms--

Lee: Relatively.

St. Julian-Varnon: Yeah, "relatively civilized". Those terms mean a lot. Because I think a lot of what we're seeing in Ukraine, and I've experienced this, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, when you've been denied Europeanness and whiteness, when you come closer to being able to claim that, one of the key factors of white supremacy and, you know, proximity is anti-Black racism. It's how you separate and make white the best.

Lee: Yup.

St. Julian-Varnon: I'm interested in this question because a lot of this, what we're seeing at the border, is a culmination of this.

Lee: Kimberly points to the fall of the Soviet Union as a key moment in the long history of white supremacy in Eastern Europe.

St. Julian-Varnon: As you see these countries become independent, nationalism rises. And it's how do we define what we are? And so if you're trying to define who you are, if you're Ukraine and Russia, and you're learning you aren't European, right? So you used to be the most powerful, second most powerful country in the world.

But now the Soviet Union's gone and you are nothing. You have no demands you can make. You have no power. And I think that's key to understanding why white supremacy fills that gap. It is a way of empowering people who did not have power after '91.

Lee: Kimberly says the rise of white supremacy in former Soviet countries didn't just stem from nationalism. It was also used as a tool for control. This was especially true in Russia around the time Vladimir Putin was first elected president in 2000.

St. Julian-Varnon: So one of the problems is after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you have just mass chaos. I mean, literally people woke up and their government didn't exist anymore. So you see a lot of violence. And in Russia you have the beginning of capitalism.

So you have mass poverty, mass crime, lots of violence. But you have Putin come to power and he's operating under, "I will maintain safety." You know, "You'll have low crime again. Everything will be safe." And so Putin has been really good at aligning himself with the far right in Russia. So this is an important backdrop to understand where some of these racist, white supremacist ideas come from.

Lee: At the same time, Russia has been able to weaponize America's anti-Black racism against us, like when it meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

St. Julian-Varnon: So what we saw in 2016, this idea that Russia is using Facebook groups and Twitter posts to, you know, drum up conflict, we need to understand, anti-Black racism in the United States has been and will continue to be a national security problem until we do something about it.

Lee: The tactic echoes how the Soviets used Jim Crow and racist violence in America as propaganda during the '20s and '30s. Far-right nationalist parties, often with deep ties to white supremacy, have been on the rise in Eastern Europe over the past decade, in countries like Poland and Hungary. Kimberly says understanding white nationalist groups in Ukraine is a little more complicated. For one, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.

St. Julian-Varnon: So he doesn't have the same purchase with white supremacist groups. But they exist in Ukraine.

Lee: The most infamous white nationalist group in Ukraine emerged in 2014 in response to Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

St. Julian-Varnon: You have very strong far-right Ukrainian nationalist groups called the Azov Battalion. They're completely Ukrainian nationalists, and they become popular because they're fighting against Russia in this eastern space.

Lee: Putin has tried to use this battalion to justify the invasion, claiming that he needs to "de-Nazify" Ukraine and save people from genocide. Putin's claim that Russia is somehow protecting Ukrainians from genocide is false, and was deeply insulting to President Zelenskyy and other Jewish people in Ukraine. Kimberly says this nationalist group has tried to go mainstream but hasn't had much success.

St. Julian-Varnon: They are putting up candidates for parliament, but like, total they've gotten, like, less than 5% of the national vote. So it's a really complicated history. Those far right white supremacist groups that are fringe, they exist. But also you still have, I would say, like, run-of-the-mill anti-Black racism in Ukraine. So you have these things kind of coexisting together.

Lee: I can't help but feel how many of us felt watching the whole conflict begin in Ukraine. Like, we felt really bad. Like, "Oh my god, this is terrible, these people, this aggression, and the loss of life," and all this stuff. And then a day later we see them dragging Black people off the train, and blocking Black people from escape. And I wonder for you, for someone who I presume has an affinity for this part of the world, what's it like, the contradiction between this interest, and then also that they may hate you, (LAUGH) at worst?

St. Julian-Varnon: Thank you for that question. No one's asked that, and I think it's, you see these images and these videos, and you're, like, in the middle of a war zone there's still anti-Black racism. But unfortunately that didn't surprise me. You know, because I had lived there and I understood, I think war and conflict often just exacerbates things like racism.

And so at least to me, it wasn't surprising. And I know if you have no experience in Eastern Europe you're just like, "What is going on?" Like, "I can't believe this." It's hard, because I do love this country. I had run into the racists in Ukraine, but I still love Ukraine.

And my overwhelming experience was positive. It's why I was able to come back and decide to do what I do. Despite instances of racism, we still live here, we still make lives here, and we still have a lotta good time here. You know, the communities that we build are strong.

It's hard to explain to people, like, why I continue to study race in Ukraine and Russia. I mean, I've had some really scary instances of racism, but I also had the babushka who asked me every day how I was doing. You know, I had a lotta people who cared about me.

Lee: Eniola Oladiti felt that contradiction too, the fear of living in Ukraine during the war, but also the kindness of some people around her, like her landlady and the landlady's boyfriend, who risked their lives to drive her to safety. We caught up with Eni again this week, and she told us that as far as she knows, her landlady is still in Ukraine.

Oladiti: Yeah, she did make it back to Sumy with her boyfriend okay. She had raised some concerns about things that have been heightened and wanting to leave, and just being quite caught in between in terms of they have nowhere to go, none of them having a job or anything like that.

Lee: But Eni hasn't heard from her for a few days.

Oladiti: She hasn't been online as far as I know since then, so it could be no connection or no phone battery. Who knows, to be honest.

Lee: Eni made it back to Ireland over the weekend, where she's now surrounded by her family. But the trauma of the last few weeks has been hard to shake.

Oladiti: The whole thing just feels like I was in a movie right now. I'd like to say I'm okay, because I am physically. However, there are certain things that I find that is maybe a little bit out of character for me, I suppose. For example, I was napping the other day and my mom walked in to my room. And I literally flew out of the bed, which is very unlike (LAUGH) me, literally ready to run. I don't know where I was running to.

Lee: Now Eni is just happy to be home.

Oladiti: I'm just, yeah, I'm just enjoying having moments and, you know, I mean, the little things I've taken for granted before, you know? Yeah, just overall sense of gratitude, I suppose.

Lee: As we wrap up, please stay in touch. Reach out on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using the handle @IntoAmericaPod. And you can tweet me @TrymaineLee, or write to us at IntoAmerica@NBCUNI.com. That was IntoAmerica@NBC and the letters UNI.com.

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Into America is produced by Sojourner Ahebee, Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, and Joshua Sirotiak. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I'm Trymaine Lee. We'll see you next Thursday.