Anders Wiklund, TT News Agency/AP

Finland's Minister for Foreign Affairs Pekka Haavisto (left) and his Swedish counterpart, Ann Linde, take part in a joint press conference with their respective defense ministers in Stockholm, Sweden, Feb. 2, 2022, after talks on European security. On Friday they attended a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

When a pro-NATO group in Finland began circulating a petition last week demanding a referendum on whether the traditionally non-aligned country should join the U.S.-led transatlantic defense alliance, the response was overwhelming.

The 50,000 signatures required to prompt a referendum debate in parliament were obtained in a matter of hours in a country of only 5.5 million.

The referendum fervor was reflected in a poll released Monday by Finland’s state broadcaster Yle. For the first time in decades of asking Finns the same question, a majority of those polled – 53% – said they favored joining NATO. Just a month ago the Helsingen Sanomat newspaper put that number at less than 30%.

What caused what former Finnish Prime Minister Alex Stubb called a “historic shift”?

In a word, Russia.

“It’s quite straightforward, actually. It’s the Russian aggression on Ukraine that’s behind this,” says Hanna Ojanen, an expert in European security integration at Finland’s University of Tampere.

“People already worried about [Russia] abstractly, and placed it somewhere among Finland’s many threats,” she says. But now, with Ukraine standing alone against its powerful neighbor, “people understand what it means even if you do have a strong partnership with NATO but are not a member,” she adds. “There will be no NATO troops coming to defend you.”

The surging interest in NATO among Finns is just one example of how Russian President Vladimir Putin may be getting the opposite of the retreat of NATO and the weakening of European and transatlantic unity that had appeared to be central aims of his war on Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has worked for years to undermine Europe’s collective institutions, especially NATO but also the European Union. Both have expanded eastward as Central and Eastern European countries increasingly looked westward for models of security and prosperity – as well as values like democracy, civil liberties, and human rights.

EU: Ukraine is “one of us”

But by unleashing a war and invading a sovereign state in the middle of Europe, Mr. Putin is accomplishing the opposite. Not only is NATO expansion on the table in a way it hasn’t been in years, but also the usually slow-moving and bureaucratic EU is showing new vigor: extending $500 million in military assistance to Ukraine in what is a first to a fellow European nation.

Sounding almost as if she were addressing Mr. Putin directly, the EU’s chief executive, Ursula von der Leyen, described Ukraine in a speech last week as “one of us, and we want them in the European Union.”

Stephanie Lecocq/AP

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at EU headquarters in Brussels, Feb. 27, 2022. The European Union is supplying Ukraine with $500 million in military assistance in response to Russia's invasion.

For many officials and regional experts, Mr. Putin has “miscalculated” and is unwittingly uniting Europe and solidifying transatlantic ties.

“This war has essentially been undertaken by Russia to affect the trajectory of Ukraine and prevent it from moving farther and farther West,” says Rajan Menon, an expert in post-Soviet states and director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank promoting restraint in U.S. military engagement. “But from what we’re seeing from some European leaders and institutions, that may have backfired.”

Another voice in the “Putin miscalculated” chorus: President Joe Biden.

“Not only is NATO more unified, look what’s going on in terms of Finland, look at what’s going on in terms of Sweden, look what’s going on in other countries,” the president told social media influencer Brian Tyler Cohen in an interview last week.

Indeed Sweden is another case in point. Long an adherent of the idea that it was better off remaining outside any military alliances, Sweden is mirroring its close defense partner Finland and leaning increasingly toward seeking NATO membership.

Finland, Sweden at NATO gathering

In part to underscore the reinvigorated transatlantic ties, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken attended a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels Friday, before moving on to planned stops in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe.

The State Department noted that the foreign ministers of Finland and Sweden would attend the NATO meeting. Finland, which shares an 800-mile-long border with Russia, fought two wars against the Soviet Union during World War II before declaring neutrality. Sweden remained neutral during World War II, and hasn’t been at war on its soil for more than 200 years.

Much of “the big shift” in Sweden’s thinking has come just in recent weeks, says Magnus Christiansson, an associate professor in defense strategy at the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm.

“The greatest driver of this is Vladimir Putin himself,” he says. “His intent is to make Swedes afraid of joining NATO, but the exact opposite is happening in public opinion.”

A poll published Friday by Aftonbladet newspaper showed that for the first time, a majority of Swedes favor NATO membership. Support for joining rose to 51%, up 9 points from a survey by the same pollster, Demoskop Institute, one month ago.

Other polls have found the biggest shift is among once-predominant “undecideds” who have swung in favor of NATO membership. And that can be directly attributed to Russia’s week-old assault on Ukraine, Dr. Christiansson says.

Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency/Reuters

Protesters hold placards at a demonstration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at Sergel's Square in central Stockholm, on March 2, 2022. A poll released Friday indicated that for the first time a majority of Swedes favored joining NATO.

Swedes have long been content with the country’s outside-the-tent relationship with the transatlantic alliance, he says. But the war – and stepped-up Russian threats against Sweden, including the incursion Wednesday of four Russian fighter jets into Swedish airspace – is a reminder that comes at a cost.

“When events are taking everyone back to the guarantee of Article 5” – the NATO charter provision on members’ collective defense – “you realize just what the cost is of not being at the members’ table,” he says.

Perhaps most striking for Dr. Christiansson is how public opinion is percolating up and affecting the country’s political leadership. The governing Social Democrats have been “dead against” NATO membership, he says, “but over the last week we’ve been hearing Social Democrats saying, ‘We need to rethink our relationship with NATO.’ It’s amazing.”

“On the side of democracy”

While the Nordic swing favoring NATO membership may be largely a practical matter of national security, experts like Dr. Christiansson say underlying factors, such as a desire to uphold long-held principles and ideals like political freedoms, should not be discounted.

“What we’re seeing is the strengthening of a transatlantic unity that is based on the fundamental ideas at the root of our lifestyle,” he says. “Swedes really understand that the freedom and liberty we enjoy in Europe is very much dependent on our ties to the United States.”

Tampere University’s Dr. Ojanen says that the “very down-to-earth” Finnish people would normally see matters of defense “in very concrete terms.”

“Ideals would not be the first thing people in Finland would talk about,” she says. “But if it really came to a point where democracy was threatened, then it would have a huge impact. It becomes more important,” she adds, “to show if you are on the side of democracy or not.”

Indeed, it is the way Russia’s war in Ukraine has come to be seen as a threat to European democracy and freedom that is at the heart of the unprecedented actions from the EU – the economic and political community of which both Finland and Sweden are members.

“This is a watershed moment for the EU,” says Sven Biscop, director of the Europe and the World Program at Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels.

Noting the EU “has never faced a situation like this before,” he says the Ukraine war presents an opportunity for the EU to emerge as a key player safeguarding Europe’s security.

Citing Sunday’s decision by the EU to provide Ukraine with military aid, Dr. Biscop says the EU is showing it will fight back against Mr. Putin’s attacks on European institutions.

“There’s a realization that if you want to be a geopolitical player,” he says, “these are the kinds of things you are going to have to do.”

Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on as he visits the construction site of the national space agency in Moscow, Feb. 27, 2022. Unlike preceding governments, the one Mr. Putin has created seems to have no effective counterbalances or moderating forces to his decision-making.

As the invasion of Ukraine grinds into its second week, many in Russia’s political and foreign-policy elites are scratching their heads over why President Vladimir Putin suddenly decided to abandon a tough diplomatic poker game with the West over NATO expansion – in which he held many cards – and veer into the uncharted territory of war and national isolation.

It may not be the first time a big power has launched an unprovoked attack on another country on false pretenses. But it’s remarkable that Mr. Putin appears to have consulted with almost no one before taking that fateful decision, leaving much of his own policy elite feeling blindsided. And how Russia’s government system, which does have at least some constitutional checks and balances, got to this point, where it appears to have failed so profoundly, is a question that some Russian political experts, particularly opposition-minded ones, are already asking out loud as they try to assess what happened along the way.

Russia has been a highly centralized and militarized autocracy for 1,000 years, and has long sought to protect itself by acquiring territory to serve as a buffer between itself and its outside enemies. But there were always controls, in the form of a czarist dynasty with a traditional aristocracy, or a Communist Party with a collegial Politburo, to moderate the behavior of the person at the top. The system created by Mr. Putin seems to have no effective counterbalances or moderating forces to his decision-making.

Afghanistan and Iraq

That contrasts with more recent examples. In 2002-03, the George W. Bush administration spent months trying to convince the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before invading that country. When the USSR went into Afghanistan in 1979, a collective leadership composed of powerful players in the Politburo made the call.

But when Mr. Putin announced his rationale for war on Feb. 24, he did so with a long, rambling speech that followed a clearly stage-managed meeting of his Security Council. During it, he badgered and scolded members of that powerful body as if they were schoolchildren.

Sputnik/Kremlin/AP

President Vladimir Putin (left) chairs a Security Council meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow, Feb. 21, 2022. Three days later, in a long, rambling speech, he announced his rationale for war.

Some say Mr. Putin’s singlehanded grip over the government was inevitable from the time he came to power pledging to restore the “power vertical” after the 1990s, when Russia’s global standing and economy foundered. Others blame conflict with the West, which became intense after a pro-Western street revolt in Kyiv and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, leading to a creeping militarization of Russian politics. They add that Mr. Putin’s isolation was deeply exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and his own apparent fear of contagion, sharply limiting his contacts with anyone beyond his close inner circle. 

His long tenure may also have played a role. 

“Putin has been in power for too long. I would compare that to a gradual, irreversible case of drug poisoning,” says Georgi Satarov, a former adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, who heads the anticorruption InDem Foundation in Moscow. “His aides have formed an information bubble around him, and he tends to believe only reports given to him by the FSB [security service]. Gradually he has formed a very specific view of himself, the world, and his place in it. And it is, a priori, a distorted image.”

Thousands of mainly urban, educated Russians have taken to the streets in recent days and signed petitions to express their dismay over the unprovoked attack on what has always been regarded as a fraternal country. Most average Russians, however, appear to be experiencing a rally-around-the-flag moment. That may explain a poll released a few days ago by the state-funded VTsIOM agency, which found that 68% supported the “limited military operation” against Ukraine, while 22% did not support it. The impact on Mr. Putin’s vaunted personal popularity rating is murkier. One poll, by the state-owned Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) found that it has surged from 60% to 71%, while a survey by the independent Levada Center puts it at 50-50 in major cities.

Meanwhile, there is a shocked silence from Russia’s large professional foreign-policy community. A few, including people known to have Kremlin access, say they had no idea that an invasion of Ukraine was in the works. They believed the military buildup on Ukraine’s border was meant to get the West’s attention and begin a diplomatic conversation over ending NATO expansion to the east and revising the security order in Europe. Andrei Kortunov, head of the prestigious Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the Foreign Ministry, told a British TV network, in a breaking voice, that he never believed that an invasion was possible.

Another top expert, Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, which often advises the Kremlin, told the Monitor that he did not see this coming. 

“I tended to interpret signs of war preparations as signs of sophisticated escalation games,” he says. “We underestimated the commitment of the Russian leadership to change the geopolitical and security environment, which they had played no role in forming and found unacceptable for a long time. When efforts to change it failed, they took this action.”

Dmitri Lovetsky/AP

Police face demonstrators in St. Petersburg, Russia, on March 1, 2022, during a protest against Russia's attack on Ukraine. Thousands of mainly urban, educated Russians have taken to the streets and signed petitions to express their dismay. But most average Russians appear to be experiencing a rally-around-the-flag moment.

Alexei Kondaurov, a former Soviet KGB major-general-turned-political-activist, says he is also in shock. “I never thought this could happen. It is sheer madness, and a personal disaster for Putin.”

He says Mr. Putin’s “transformation” happened after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, which Russians lauded.

“He never met with opposition,” Mr. Kondaurov says. “Not when he waged war in Syria, amended the Russian Constitution, or ran for re-election. He got away with everything.”

Stanislav Shushkevich, the former president of Belarus who was replaced 26 years ago by Alexander Lukashenko, shares that perception. “Power is a drug,” he told the Monitor. “Just like [Mr. Lukashenko], he’s been in power too long, and with no democratic constraints, they forget about their state responsibilities.”

All roads now lead to Putin

Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, pledging to restore order after a disastrous post-Soviet decade and build a durable Russian-style democracy. In one of his recent speeches, he even revealed that he once asked United States President Bill Clinton if Russia could join NATO. (He said he did not get an encouraging response.)

In early years, Russia’s political system resembled a big, sprawling corporation with many influential players, and Mr. Putin was like the chairman of the board, says Nikolai Petrov, an expert with Chatham House in London. But that shifted over time.

“We gradually witnessed the construction of one single power pyramid to replace multiple ones, now directly subordinated to Putin,” he says. “The degree of personalization increased in a very direct way. Putin became the single source of legitimacy. He was increasingly less dependent on other players, whether they were regional leaders, corporate heads, government officials, politicians, or even security elites.”

Then came the pandemic, which Mr. Petrov says made things worse. “So, instead of people who might have given him useful advice, he became surrounded by close aides, bodyguards, and such. ... Putin is a capable person, but he is the enemy of the internet, and his isolation has become extreme.”

History, too, looms large in Mr. Putin’s mind.

The Russian president has become obsessed with righting what he sees as historical wrongs, says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Putin adviser-turned-critic, arguing that he has turned away from his earlier interest in state-building to drag Russia into a confrontation with the West that it cannot win.

“Ukraine was a trigger, not his basic purpose,” says Mr. Pavlovsky. It is the prime example, he says, that Mr. Putin believes Russia was deceived about the West’s intentions to expand NATO into its backyard, and he became certain that Western leaders were planning to use Ukraine as a launching pad for attacking Russia. “Now we are in a battle where it’s an eye for an eye, you hit us and we’ll hit you.”

He adds: “It is not clear that the Putin system can survive.”

[Editor's note: The story was updated to correct the spelling of Alexei Kondaurov's surname.]

Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Ojonugwa Zakari was trying to pretend life was going on as normal in her university halls. She’d woken up early, showered, and was brushing her hair, when the first mortar shell exploded.

“I don’t think anything prepares you for war – it was like my heart stopped beating,” she says, speaking over a crackling line from Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, just 30 miles from the Russian border. “I was thinking, is this real?”

As panicked students fled to a bunker, where they hugged each other and tried to confirm what was happening, Ms. Zakari, a medical student from Nigeria, had another grim realization. With Sumy State University located just a stone’s throw from the invading country, the closest ways to safety would be hundreds of miles west or south to the borders of Poland, Moldova, Hungary, or Romania.  

As those huddled began discussing how they might flee on WhatsApp and Telegram groups for international students – one sixth of the university’s students are foreigners, mostly from India and sub-Saharan Africa – another fear cropped up, one that some Black people say is ever present in Ukraine. 

Reports of racism against those fleeing Russian attacks gripped the students who felt frozen in place.

A Black mother and baby forced to give up their train seats. A young Black man beaten after waiting hours in line in subzero temperatures. A group of terrified Black African students, repeatedly refused entry to a safe haven, traversing hundreds of miles in search of another border. These were among the stories reported by Nigerian nationals to consular officers.

Indian national papers carried reports of students who say they were viciously beaten by Ukrainian and Polish border guards. And dozens of similarly frightening incidents had begun circulating on social media.

The reports were part of the reason Ms. Zakari had hesitated to flee earlier, choosing instead to stock up supplies and hunker down. Now, as the students whispered among themselves – was that machine gunfire in the streets? – she realized she had no chance of leaving.

Widespread reports of mistreatment

Nine days after Russia began bombarding Ukraine from the air, land, and sea, more than a million people have fled across international borders to safety. Among them are tens of thousands of African nationals who have been swept up in a war far from their own homes. 

While overwhelmed neighboring countries have largely welcomed those pouring into its borders, the African Union said Monday that it was also disturbed by widespread reports of African citizens being beaten, thrown off trains, or simply refused the right to cross borders. 

“Reports that Africans are singled out for unacceptable dissimilar treatment would be shockingly racist and breach international law,” the AU said in a statement. Allegations of racist mistreatment have been leveled against Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian border guards.

“We hear about the racism going on at the Polish border. We that are caught here are worried that we might face this racial problem when we finally manage to make it to the  border,” says Ms. Zakari. “It will really be bad if that happens after all this stress that we are currently going through.”

Yara Nardi/Reuters

People who made it across the border of Poland await transit to a refugee center in Przemyśl, Poland, March 1, 2022. Noting allegations of racist mistreatment that have been leveled against Ukrainian, Polish, and Hungarian border guards, the African Union said, “Reports that Africans are singled out for unacceptable dissimilar treatment would be shockingly racist and breach international law."

Like about a dozen other stranded African students and their parents who spoke to the Monitor, Ms. Zakari says she felt only the presence of the international media – or, ideally, of United Nations officials – would guarantee her right to safe passage once at the Ukrainian border.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, said March 3 it would begin evacuating some 5,000 nationals from Ukraine and neighboring countries.

Ironically, Ukraine has a long history of racial diversity – alongside one of discrimination. Many African nations have complicated ties with both Russia and Eastern European countries dating back to the Cold War, when the continent’s newly independent countries largely allied with the Soviet bloc against their former Western colonizers.

In recent decades, Ukraine has been seen as a cheaper alternative to Western Europe and the United States, making it a popular destination for students from across Africa and India. Now, its besieged cities are home to around 20,000 Indian students, while Morocco, Nigeria, and Egypt account for 16,000 more students. 

Western media sets racist tone 

But accusations of deeply entrenched racism go beyond Ukraine’s borders – beginning with the way the war is being reported by Western media outlets.

Peter Dobbie, an Al Jazeera English anchor, was criticized for using comparisons of Arabs and North Africans in his descriptions of Ukrainian refugees, and the network apologized for his comments.

“What is compelling is that just looking at them, the way they’re dressed,” he observed. “These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war. These are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

In other cases contributing to this tone, appeals to humanity have been based on the fact Ukraine is a white, Western nation.

“It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair and blue eyes being killed every day with Putin’s missiles and his helicopters and his rockets,” David Sakvarelidze, Ukraine’s former deputy general prosecutor, said, unchallenged, in a BBC interview on Saturday.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry initially dismissed allegations of racism by border officials as “Russian disinformation.” But as both the number of reported incidents – and an ensuing backlash, which has been particularly ferocious on social media – continued to increase, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said March 3 it had set up an emergency hotline specially for African and Asian students.  

Garba Shehu, an adviser to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, praised the “generosity of spirit of the Ukrainian people” that currently enables some 4,000 Nigerians to study there. 

“We also appreciate that those in official positions in security and border management will in most cases be experiencing impossible expectations in a situation they never expected,” he added. 

“But, for that reason, it is paramount that everyone is treated with dignity and without favor.” 

Some African countries have begun slowly evacuating their citizens, although efforts have been patchy as airspaces remain closed.

For parents at home on the continent, the days have trickled by as they anxiously await news.

Ibrahim Umar, a 52-year-old lawyer in Kaduna in northern Nigeria, said he had barely slept after hearing about the war. Eight thousand miles away, his 19-year-old son Usman, a medic at the University of Dnipro, fled Tuesday after his student lodging came under fire. 

The family scraped together money for him to get a train ticket to Poland. But on arrival, five days later, more agonizing news came.

“We were happy to hear that they had arrived at the border safely, only for him to call me back saying that Polish officials were selecting only white people and allowing them into Poland, and that Black people were not allowed,” Mr. Umar says of his son’s odyssey.

Again, the Umar relatives organized another round of fundraising for the younger Mr. Umar to head to Romania – where, again, the student was turned away.

“At this point the boy was crying, I was crying, his mother has been crying since the war broke out,” says the elder Mr. Umar. Eventually, his son was able to cross the Hungarian border.

“We took these kids abroad to study because of the problems we have with our universities here. But now it’s war and racism we get in Europe,” he says.

Imagine having “time to be racist”

As news arrived March 3 of the first major Ukrainian city being captured by Russia, Ms. Zakari, the Nigerian medical student, said she and her fellow foreign students felt their morale slipping.

But Ms. Zakari, who has ventured briefly out to the town twice to top up food and water, says where once there were daily running gun battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces, now the city’s empty streets are chilling – and both residents and students believed any attempt at fleeing would be too dangerous. Hungry Russian soldiers were looting shops and houses in the region, local press reported.

After another night of fierce bombardment, Ms. Zakari said today that her group’s water supply is good for just two days. But she was finding solace with her fellow international students, sharing hopeful news and funny memes as they tried to keep their spirits up. The university’s Nigerian student union had made a video appeal for all African students to be safely evacuated, which students from Angola to Zambia were disseminating among friends, family, and consular officers. 

Her only hope, Ms. Zakari says, is to get to a western border town safely once the fighting calms down – and then pray she isn’t stopped because of the color of her skin.

“Imagine that you’re in the same situation as everyone else, and you still have time to be racist,” she says, her voice breaking on the phone. 

When Mahdis Keshavarz watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold in the news last week, she almost immediately noticed a peculiar sense of astonishment pervading much of the coverage. 

Journalists on air and in print were not only expressing shock that a war like this could happen in a European city, but also comparing it to conflicts in the Middle East in ways Ms. Keshavarz and others found deeply offensive.

One of the first instances came from CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata, reporting from Kyiv: “But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose my words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.” Mr. D’Agata has since expressed regret for his words, and apologized.

“I spoke in a way I regret, and for that I’m sorry,” he said in a statement. “You should never compare conflicts anyway, each one is unique.”

A board member of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA), Ms. Keshavarz and others began to hear from members in newsrooms around the world, even as they witnessed journalists from the United Kingdom and France expressing a similar sense of shock that this could happen in a majority-white, European city. 

“We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin,” said Philippe Corbé, a French correspondent with France’s BFM TV. “We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.” According to AFP, the broadcaster said Mr. Corbé’s remarks were “clumsy but taken out of context ... [and] led to the mistaken belief that he was defending a position opposite to the one he wanted to emphasize, and he regrets this.”

Aaron Chown/PA/AP

Little Amal is greeted by crowds at St. Paul's Cathedral in London on Oct. 23, 2021. The giant puppet representing a young Syrian refugee was part of an art initiative that traveled from Syria to the United Kingdom to focus attention on the needs of young refugees.

During the first week of the invasion, many reporters spoke of being stunned by, as one British headline put it, “an attack on civilization itself.” The implication that war was acceptable in other, less white, parts of the world was not lost on critics.

• Al Jazeera English anchor Peter Dobbie compared the “middle class” Ukrainians with those fleeing conflict in the Middle East or Africa. For its part Al Jazeera apologized, saying “the breach of professionalism is being dealt with.”
• Lucy Watson of ITV news said, “Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, third world nation; this is Europe.”
• Daniel Hannan, in the British newspaper The Telegraph, wrote: “They seem so like us. That is what makes this so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

One of the roles of AMEJA, Ms. Keshavarz says, is not only to bring more diversity into the profession of journalism, but also to uphold its ethical principles of fairness and point out the ongoing problems of both implicit and explicit bias in the news. The association condemned what it saw as “the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.”

“The statement wasn’t in any way an attempt to take away from the suffering that’s happening in Ukraine, or the lack of importance of this political moment – it is absolutely important,” says Ms. Keshavarz, also founder of The Make Agency, a strategic media and public relations firm in New York. “I think that I understand, and we all need to understand, that for Europeans, white Europeans, to see their ethnodemographic group as the majority of people having to cross a border as refugees, that is shocking, because for the first time, they see themselves.”

In the 20th century, of course, Europe was the site of two of the most brutal conflicts in human history – World War I and World War II – including an unprecedented amount of carnage and destruction. In the 1990s, genocide erupted in the Balkan states of Europe. The war broke apart the former Yugoslavia and lasted more than a decade.

“Some people expressed similar shock at the beginning of World War II that a nation with so rich an artistic and cultural history as Germany could start a war,” says John Vile, professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University.

The stunned comments coming from journalists and others over the past week might stem from feelings of racial superiority, he says, even if in an unconscious way. But the current conflict in Europe also has the potential to engulf the world in a global conflagration similar to those in the 20th century, says Professor Vile. “And thus they could signal greater consequences for overall world peace than wars in other areas of the world.”

Journalists, however, have a special role to play as people make informed choices, says Sally Lehrman, chief executive of The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organizations that promotes standards of transparency, accuracy, and inclusion within the profession. 

Petros Giannakouris/AP/File

Volunteers help migrants and refugees on a dinghy as they arrive on the shore of the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey, March 20, 2016. "We rarely see ... Brown and Black faces showing joy, success, and accomplishment in the news,” says Sally Lehrman, head of The Trust Project.

“Journalists today are generally making an effort to be more inclusive in their reporting and learn how to represent people whose identity they don’t share more fully and honestly in the news,” says Ms. Lehrman. 

The expressions of shock coming from some reporters do, however, demonstrate certain “broken thought patterns that get in their way,” she says. “When we have majority white, middle-class newsrooms, these are the kinds of traps journalists can fall into. Think about the news images we normally see of war and human distress – they’re almost always showing Brown or Black faces. And we rarely see those Brown and Black faces showing joy, success, and accomplishment in the news unless they are held up as an exception.”

“This habit in news coverage reinforces the implicit bias that war and conflict somehow doesn’t ‘belong’ in the European context,” Ms. Lehrman says. “So basically, we in journalism have a lot of work to do.” 

Ms. Keshavarz notes how many of the journalists appeared to know what they were implying, offering caveats about choosing “my words carefully” or being “loath to say.”  

“I think it’s an unguarded moment that we’re seeing,” she says. “They know it’s wrong to say, and yet, how bad can it be? It’s just the truth for them. So it still remains acceptable to make these comparisons, where we’ve decided that it’s expected in the Middle East or in African nations, because conflict and violence is just a natural way of life in these places, because that is just how we are.”

“And that is so far from the truth, because it also absolutely negates even some basic knowledge of what the cities and communities and societies in those regions were like historically – even during the past 20 years before conflict arose,” she says.

“As journalists, it’s really our job to point these biases out,” Ms. Keshavarz continues. “It’s a critical blind spot in the way newsrooms are functioning, and the way many journalists are functioning.” 

Reuters

Workers stack cotton fabric rolls at a textile factory in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Propelled by the rapid pace of today’s fashion industry to introduce new styles – known as fast fashion – it’s no wonder many clothes buyers find themselves with a “closet of regrets,” as The Wall Street Journal dubs it. All the clothes that don’t get worn can hang heavy on a consumer’s mind until they are finally thrown away. The trouble is, “There’s no ‘away’ for your clothes,” says Maxine Bédat, author of a 2021 book, “Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment,” and an activist trying to alter the industry’s wasteful ways.

A few stats tell the story. Every second, worldwide, the equivalent of a garbage truck of textiles is dumped in landfills or burned in incinerators. The plastic that makes up 60% of clothes ends up as microplastics in seas, soil, air, even arctic ice. The industry produces 10% of all carbon emissions and a fifth of industrial water pollution worldwide. 

Although some companies have voluntarily tried to minimize their environmental and social impact, little progress has been made. So, this January a bill was introduced in New York state’s legislature that would set high standards for the industry while helping consumers better understand the impact of their purchases. The bill is aimed at the recognized fashion capital of the world: New York City.

Known as the New York Fashion Act, the proposed law would require every large multinational fashion name operating in the state – from luxury brands to fast-fashion giants – to map their global supply chains, disclose their environmental and social impacts, and set Science-Based Targets to cut emissions. Failure to meet the targets could bring a 2% penalty on annual revenue

Ms. Bédat, who worked with the bill’s co-sponsors to craft the measure, says the industry’s pell-mell growth in the 1990s led to a race for ever cheaper costs. That led to supply chains so dispersed and tangled that clothing brands themselves were in the dark. Calls for voluntary standards and corporate responsibility only led many companies on a detour of “greenwashing” – using often-dubious claims of “sustainability” as a marketing tool.

The bill is pro-business, contends Ms. Bédat, because it would level the playing field for companies to operate at the same environmental standards. It “is an effort to meet industry [leaders] where they are, recognize the good faith efforts they are already making, and come up with a common standard, but do so with some teeth,” she told The New York Times.

Also involved in the bill’s creation was Ken Pucker, former chief operating officer of Timberland, a footwear company respected for its environmental leadership. “When you look back over the 20-25 years since corporate responsibility started, emissions are up 50%, says Mr. Pucker, now a senior lecturer at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “So, something’s not working.”

“We have a system that values growth coupled with more people with more consumptive capacity coupled with cheaper stuff issued more frequently coupled with social media,” he says. When asked if a new consciousness of growth is needed, Mr. Pucker replies, “I’d say we need a new consciousness of success” – a broader vision of what and how we interpret value.

Similarly, Ms. Bédat is looking beyond the “more” of fashion to how people value their clothes. While researching her book, she followed the story of a garment from its beginning in cotton fields to oil rigs to textile mills, talking to the people whose work ends up in clothing. Afterward, she saw her own clothes differently. To really see them, she needed fewer of them. She learned to muzzle the barrage of marketing and social media influencers that drive the “more” of fashion.

“We need a richer relationship with our things,” she concludes. “And the value of them comes from the story behind our things as much as the things themselves. ... The message of my book is to really love your things,” she said in an RSA podcast.

Her book closes with a vision of a future when “we will love our [clothes] because we have wrested control of our own attention and removed the noise in our inboxes and on our social media channels that had distracted us from our true needs and desires. And we bought them not ... to fill other holes in our lives, but from an aware and informed mindset.” That could be just enough to clear out anyone’s “closet of regrets.”