I have just bottled my new Ukrainian-style stout, brewed as part of the Brew Ukraine initiative; at the beginning of the invasion, the Pravda craft brewery in Lviv had to stop brewing and switch to a war footing, so they made their recipes and label artwork freely available for other brewers – including home brewers – to produce their beer and help raise funds. I haven’t, unfortunately, found any proper UK breweries doing this, which is a shame as I’d have liked to have had an idea in advance what I was aiming for, but what I’ve got is dark and luscious with a hint of smokiness. Now available for a donation of £2 per 330ml bottle, all proceeds to humanitarian relief – with postage and packing on top if anyone beyond the immediate locality wants to try it, I’m afraid, as I suspect that might be a bit pricy. Cheers! Onwards Ukraine! Putin is a dick, as one of their other beers has it.
It’s a great initiative, imaginative and engaging, and offering a real connection with people who need help rather than just an abstract notion of charity. I’m honestly not sure whether that diminishes or exacerbated the nagging question in the back of my mind: why Ukraine? Why not Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Ukraine in 2014, or the Uighur in China, or Ethiopia or Eritrea? ‘Whataboutery’ is a well-established means of derailing argument and undermining solidarity, implying that caring about one thing is hypocrisy unless you have demonstrably cared about every other thing – but it is not always an illegitimate question, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable.
I’ve given money to multiple appeals for humanitarian relief over the years, and support charities working to support refugees, but would have to admit that I do feel more engaged in this case, just as the western world more generally has responded much more energetically. I can completely understand why, from the perspective of Syria or Yemen or Afghanistan, this looks like hypocrisy, probably driven by self-interest (cf. the number of accounts on the Twitter pushing the ‘West is using Ukraine to attack Russia’ narrative), and racism. I can only speculate about the general response, but the least I can do is examine my own.
I think I can honestly say that I do not feel more compassion for Ukrainians because they are white, or European; I firmly believe that all people deserve help and support, and all refugees need to be welcomed, because they are human, rather than drawing up hierarchies based on supposed cultural affinity – let alone trying to exclude some groups altogether on such grounds. But I cannot deny that it is easier to find points of connection with Ukraine in other ways.
Ukrainian cities look (or looked) like cities that I’ve visited in Central and Eastern Europe, whereas Aleppo or Kabul look very foreign. Ukrainian jazz is right at home alongside the Polish jazz that I love. They have craft breweries! I don’t know how far they’re into artisan espresso – I remain scarred by the inexplicable popularity of Nescafé in Serbia – but it seems a reasonable bet. This cannot help but make a difference – it’s a matter of the pleasingly unfamiliar (different beer styles, different scales and rhythms) within the safely familiar (beer, jazz); variations on known traditions, rather than radically different traditions.
This goes hand in hand with the technological developments that make such affinities accessible – I could simply look up lists of Ukrainian jazz artists and find their music on Spotify and BandCamp – and bring them to the fore, as Ukrainians have been undeniably great at the whole internet thing, from Zelensky downwards. Again, it’s the power of novelty in a familiar context, the very definition of a meme; “Go fuck yourself Russian warship!”; tractor-pulling-tank jokes; the multiple versions of the blue-and-yellow visual identify; feisty grandmothers giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and so forth.
Further: whereas the accounts I follow to try to understand what’s happening in Syria or Afghanistan or Ethiopia seem mostly to be reporters in a conventional sense, a fair number of the Ukrainian ones are more like curators, gathering, translating and contextualising accounts from people on the ground; I’m not sure whether this is more a reflection of greater online activity in the country generally, or a different style of reporting, or just the randomness of which accounts I’ve ended up following, but again it makes a difference to the sense of connection and emotional engagement. Finally, there’s a greater possibility of engaging in return, since so many know some English; discover jazz musician, send a message, have a conversation – let alone the whole Brew Ukraine initiative.
Thirdly, there’s the nature of the situation: blatant war of aggression, rather than messy civil war. It’s harder – not impossible, of course – to do a convincing “they’re both as bad as each other” take, and the argument that Ukraine is simply being used by Western powers as a proxy, “let’s you and him fight”, likewise seems to require an implausible stretch of the imagination (and yet, Noam Chomsky and Juli Zeh disagree. Should I reconsider? Nah).
True, there’s a lot of “we must support Ukraine for the sake of The West” about, just as the USA goes into a spasm of demonstrating why we might be cautious about looking to it as a shining beacon of human values – a reminder of the considerable overlap between the rhetoric of some of the most fervent defenders of Western Cizilization TM and that of Putin when it comes to women’s rights, racial equality, gay rights etc. (Decadence klaxon!). Maybe we should support Ukraine as part of the defence of our values internally as well as externally? I would rather support Ukraine for the sake of Ukraine.
And there is even hope, that this is the version of the Melian Dialogue when others do come to the aid of the weak and where the chances of war do indeed come to bite back against the strong – and, if you’re really optimistic, that stopping Russian aggression now would have a beneficial knock-on effect across the world. And the hope that solidarity with Ukraine is not a one-off, that it’s a product of a specific set of circumstances, especially social media, that didn’t exist or operate in the same way before but which might support similar solidarity in future…
Sphinx 
Two points. Firstly, I think all the factors you half-apologetically mention are real: it’s undeniable that people have a stronger and more immediate sense of solidarity (or anger, or horror, or despair) with some victims of war than others, and I think it’s a matter of connections. The more you have or can plausibly imagine, the more you feel it’s your problem.
Secondly, there is a temptation to beat yourself up over this, but I’m not sure how useful it is or where it really comes from. One of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn was so bad at party discipline was that he’d had decades of activism in areas where he couldn’t realistically count on everyone else following his lead (or anyone else, for that matter). He’d join the demonstration in support of imprisoned trade unionists in Colombia (or whatever), and if other people also joined so much the better, but if they didn’t nobody could make them. This “it’s great if you’re with us, but if not, never mind” attitude ran right through his politics – which, as I say, was unfortunate when it came to leading a deeply divided party.
What’s interesting in the present context was that international solidarity was one of the things that people really hated about Corbyn – it was very much his thing. And yet it went along with an attitude totally different from that nagging voice saying you care so much about that, shouldn’t you also care about this? – in fact that’s a rhetorical move more characteristic of people trying to undermine or discredit international solidarity, when they think it’s taking the wrong kind of forms. So I wouldn’t listen to it, frankly.
As ever, thank you for commenting. This is, as I said, very much a bit of personal agonising, without any suggestion that it might be useful… Mention of Corbyn reminds me that I might equally have framed this in terms of “oh, so suddenly you’re all keen on NATO militarism?”, and of course various bits of the post-9/11 anti-war movement have (effectively) refused solidarity to Ukraine on precisely those grounds, at the same time as vacillating liberals like me wonder if in retrospect we over-reacted to the evils of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya to the cost of Syrians.