Gary Younge

ALL PROSPECT COLUMNIST ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICK TAYLOR

“I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh,” Maya Angelou once told me. “Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African American… But if I make the effort to learn the language and respect the mores then I should be able to get along anywhere and with any kind of people. I think I belong wherever human beings are.”

Ukrainians are no better, or worse, than Syrians, Yemenis, Eritreans or Iraqis at telling people stories and making them laugh. And yet the west has fallen in love with them as refugees in a way it has proved incapable of doing with those from Africa and the Arab world. The inhumanity and hypocrisy are self-evident. In Calais, Ukrainians are put up in hotels for free while Sudanese and Eritrean teenagers are evicted from campsites by armed police. Watching footage of Ukrainians desperately trying to board trains heading west, Al Jazeera presenter Peter Dobbie explained: these are “prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East… [or] North Africa.” They look “like any European family that you would live next door to.”