Left Behind and Hunted: Two African Men Speak About the Terror of Living in Ukraine

A chance encounter on a morning train in Dachau, and a later conversation with a man too afraid to use his real name — together, they tell a story the world has not fully reckoned with: the open, deadly racism that Black Africans endured inside Ukraine, while the West looked away and kept writing checks.

By Our Reporter  |  World Affairs Desk, Real News Online

Reporting from Germany  ·  Published June 12, 2026  ·  Updated June 12, 2026

Opinion  ·  Human Rights  

“They Would Kill a Black Man Without Any Fear” — Two Africans Break Their Silence on some in Ukraine’s society.

It began on a platform at Dachau station, on the morning of June 12th, 2026. Our reporter was waiting for the train, wrestling with heavy luggage, when a man standing nearby stepped forward without being asked and offered to help. He was quietly dressed, calm, heading to work — the same early journey he makes five days a week, out the door before six in the morning, finished by two in the afternoon. His name is Monday. He is from Nigeria. He lived in Ukraine for nearly fifteen years. They spoke while they waited. When the train arrived, they sat next to each other. And in the time it took to reach his stop, Monday said two things that our reporter could not unhear.

“In Ukraine,” he said, looking straight ahead at the passing German countryside, “almost everyone there would kill a Black person without any fear. Without any fear at all.”

He paused. Then: “And if you went to the police — they would ignore the crime. They would not just ignore it. They would celebrate it. The murder of a Black man in Ukraine was something to celebrate.”

His stop came. He gathered his bag, nodded once, and stepped off the train — heading to his shift, the way he does every day, in a country that gave him safety after a country that nearly took his life.

Those words stayed with our reporter for the rest of the journey. By the time we reached our destination later that day, we had found another man willing to speak — though not by his real name. He asked to be called Akim. He is African, he is living in Germany, and he is afraid.

Editorial note on sources: Monday spoke to our reporter on the record on June 12th, 2026, on a train passing through Dachau, Germany. A second source, referred to in this article as “Akim,” is an African national currently residing in Germany who lived in Ukraine for an extended period. He requested anonymity citing fear of retribution. His account forms the basis of the detailed testimony that follows.

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Akim’s Story: A Decade of Fear

Akim came to Ukraine as a young man, full of ambition and cautious hope. He had heard that Ukrainian universities were affordable, that the country was opening up, that a hard-working African man could build something there. What he built, over the years that followed, was mostly a survival strategy.

“The first time I was attacked,” he said, speaking quietly, “I thought it was unusual. An exception. I told myself — this is not how most people here are.” He shook his head slowly. “I was wrong. It was not an exception. It was the introduction.”

He described nearly ten years of low-grade hostility that occasionally erupted into open violence. Being followed in markets. Being refused service in shops. Being told by neighbors, without shame or lowered voices, that he did not belong. And then, on more occasions than he could count, being physically attacked — on public transport, on streets, outside bars and restaurants where he had made the mistake of existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He went to the police after the worst of these attacks. He should not have bothered.

“They looked at me like I was the problem,” he said. “Not the men who attacked me. Me. One officer laughed. Another told me to go back to Africa. They did not file anything. They did not even pretend to file anything. They just waited for me to leave.”

The police did not just ignore the crime. They made you feel that you deserved it. That a Black man who is beaten in Ukraine brought it on himself by being there.— “Akim,” African national, former resident of Ukraine, speaking from Germany

The Crimea Years: Nationalism With a Racial Edge

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and the Donbas conflict ignited in the east, Akim was already several years into his life in Ukraine. He watched as the political atmosphere shifted — as the language of patriotism grew louder, as ultranationalist groups moved from the fringes toward the mainstream, and as Black and African residents of the country found themselves in an increasingly dangerous position.

“The war gave certain people permission,” he said. “Permission they felt they already had, but now it was — official, somehow. Patriotic. If you were Black, you were suspect. You were foreign in a moment when foreign meant enemy.”

He witnessed African acquaintances attacked by men wearing the insignia of far-right organizations. He himself was chased on more than one occasion. He learned which neighborhoods to avoid, which hours were safer, which faces meant danger. He lived, he said, like a man reading a map that could change without warning.

Through all of it, he stayed. He had built a life. He had people he cared about — including, eventually, a Nigerian wife who had also come to Ukraine to build a future, and two children born on Ukrainian soil. The bitter irony of that — two children born as Ukrainian citizens in a country that would treat their father as subhuman — was not lost on him. Leaving felt like surrender. It also felt, for a long time, unnecessary. “I kept thinking: it will get better. Countries change. People change.” He looked at his hands. “Ukraine did not change.”

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The 2022 Invasion: The Mask Comes Off

When Russian forces crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the scenes at Ukrainian border crossings shocked the world — but not for the reasons the Ukrainian government intended. Within 48 hours, videos filmed by African, Indian, and Middle Eastern nationals went viral across the globe, documenting what was happening to non-white evacuees trying to flee.

African students were pulled from trains. Men were beaten back from border checkpoints by Ukrainian border guards wielding batons. Women with children were sent to the back of lines that stretched for miles in freezing temperatures. In documented cases, Black evacuees were forced off buses at gunpoint to make room for Ukrainian nationals — even when those buses had been organized specifically for foreign nationals.

These were not isolated incidents. They were systematic. And they were witnessed by thousands.

For Akim, the invasion was the moment fifteen years of suppressed fear became immediate, mortal danger. “It was not just the Russians I was afraid of,” he said. “I was afraid of Ukrainians. Because in chaos, a Black man has no protection. There is no law. There is no one watching. And I knew — I had spent years learning — what some of these people were capable of.”

He described watching as a fellow African man he knew was surrounded by a group who accused him of being a Russian spy — a pretext used repeatedly against Black men in those first desperate days of the invasion. The beating that followed happened in public, in front of witnesses. Some filmed it on their phones.

“And then,” Akim said, his voice dropping, “one of the men who beat him was applauded. People clapped. Standing there watching, people clapped.” He was quiet for a moment. “I have never felt more alone than I felt in that moment.”

Some of these people would kill a Black man without any fear at all. Not because of war. Because they wanted to. Because they believed they had the right. And the police — the police would celebrate it.— “Akim,” speaking from Germany

The Escape: Three Lives, One Chance

Akim’s escape from Ukraine was not cinematic. It was terror and calculation and a father’s love — the particular love that keeps a man moving when everything in his body tells him to stop.

With his Nigerian wife and their two young children — both born in Ukraine — he left in the pre-dawn hours of February 26th, 2022, thirty-six hours into the invasion. They moved on foot through streets lit by distant explosions, joining the vast human river flowing westward. The cruelest detail: his children were Ukrainian-born, and still the country treated their father as an enemy.

At a checkpoint outside the city, he was separated from his wife and children and held for hours. Soldiers questioned him. He showed his documents again and again. He kept his voice level. He thought about his children’s faces.

His wife argued with the soldiers on his behalf — standing her ground against armed men in a country at war. Eventually they were released. They walked, and took a crowded bus, and walked again, and reached the Polish border — where even there, even with a Nigerian wife and two Ukrainian-born children, he was pulled aside and processed separately from his own family.

They reached Germany. They have not returned to Ukraine.

“My wife is Nigerian,” he said. “We both came to Ukraine as Africans trying to build a life. Our children were born there — born on Ukrainian soil. And still that country looked at us like we were nothing. Like we had no right to exist there.” He paused. “It took me nearly ten years to understand that this would never change.”

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Who Stayed to Fight — And Who Ran

There is a detail about the Ukraine war that Western media has been reluctant to examine with full honesty: while the fighting was at its most desperate, a significant number of Ukrainian men of fighting age fled the country — crossing into Poland, Germany, and across Europe — rather than take up arms in defense of the nation whose cause the world was being asked to fund.

Meanwhile, foreign volunteers — Americans, Britons, Canadians, Georgians, and others from across the globe — traveled in the opposite direction, entering Ukraine to stand in the trenches and defend a country not their own. They came out of principle, out of conviction, out of a belief that democracy was worth bleeding for. Some did not come back.

Akim watched this unfold from inside Ukraine before his escape. “The men who had chased Africans through the streets, who had stood by while we were beaten, who had told us to go back to Africa — many of those same men were crossing the border into Poland,” he said. “And foreigners — Americans, others — were coming in to fight for Ukraine. To die for Ukraine. For a Ukraine that had treated us like animals.”

The bitterness in his voice was not anger for its own sake. It was the specific bitterness of a man who had watched the world pour sympathy and treasure into a country whose ultranationalist elements had made his life a decade-long ordeal — and who now watched those same elements return, once the worst of the fighting subsided, to resume their activities as if nothing had changed.

Because for them, nothing had. The war did not reform Ukraine’s far-right fringe. It did not drive out the neo-Nazi ideology that had been documented inside certain Ukrainian military battalions — most notoriously the Azov movement — by human rights organizations for years. When the dust began to settle, those men came home. And the ideology came with them.

“They ran when it was dangerous,” Akim said. “And they came back when it was safe. And the first thing they came back to was the same hatred they left with. The foreigners who fought and died for Ukraine — those men deserved better than to have died for this.”

Foreign volunteers — Americans and others — came to fight and die for Ukraine. The Ukrainian men who had spent years hunting Black people in the streets ran across the border into safety. Then they came back — and brought their ideology with them.— “Akim,” speaking from Germany

The World That Looked Away — And the Politicians Who Noticed

What Monday said on the train, and what Akim described across a table in Germany, was not invisible to the world in 2022. It was filmed, documented, and reported. What is remarkable is how briefly the outrage lasted — and how quickly the dominant narrative of Ukrainian victimhood absorbed any serious accounting of what Black Africans experienced inside that country.

The African Union issued a formal statement on February 28, 2022, condemning what it called “the shocking and inhumane treatment” of African nationals at Ukraine’s borders, declaring: “Reports that Africans are being asked to disembark from trains and prevented from crossing the Polish border are of grave concern and unacceptable.”

Senegalese President Macky Sall, speaking as chair of the African Union, stated plainly that the treatment of Africans at Ukrainian borders was “discriminatory and racist.”

In the United States, where the question of Ukraine aid became one of the defining political debates of the decade, a significant number of voices — across media and the halls of Congress — raised serious questions about unconditional American support for Kyiv.

“We have invested hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars into this conflict. And we have asked almost no questions. That is not foreign policy. That is a blank check written on the backs of American workers.”

— Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Senate floor remarks, 2023

“Not one more cent to Ukraine until we know exactly where every dollar has gone and what it has accomplished.”

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), House floor, 2023

“I’ve been consistent. I don’t think we should be sending money to Ukraine. I think we should be taking care of Americans.”

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), press conference, 2024

“Why is the United States responsible for the security of Ukraine? Why isn’t Europe handling this? Why are American taxpayers being asked to fund a war on the other side of the world while our own border is open?”

— Tucker Carlson, Fox News, 2023 (nightly audience of approximately 3 million)

None of those voices made the treatment of Black Africans a specific condition of their opposition. But the broader question they raised — of accountability, of what American money is actually funding — applies with full force to a country whose institutions, as Monday and Akim both described, treated Black lives as disposable long before the first Russian tank crossed the border.

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What the Record Shows

The testimonies of Monday and Akim are consistent with the documented record. Human Rights Watch has documented anti-Black racism in Ukraine stretching back years before the 2022 invasion — racially motivated violence, police refusal to investigate, and the mainstreaming of far-right ultranationalist ideology in parts of Ukrainian civil society and, alarmingly, elements of its military.

European anti-racism monitoring bodies recorded dozens of racially motivated attacks on African students and residents in Ukrainian cities between 2010 and 2022 — the overwhelming majority of which were never prosecuted.

A 2022 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees documented specific instances of African nationals being denied access to evacuation transport and border crossing facilities on racial grounds during the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

None of this was made a condition of Western support. None of it became a subject of formal diplomatic concern by the United States government. The billions flowed — and the questions were not asked.

Two Men. One Truth.

Monday is on a train somewhere in Germany right now, making his way to a job that starts at six in the morning. He helped a stranger with heavy luggage and said two sentences that contained more truth than most official statements issued about Ukraine in the last four years.

Akim is rebuilding — carefully, quietly, in a country where the law protects him and the police do not laugh when he walks through the door. He asked us not to use his name. He is still afraid. That fear, in itself, is a kind of testimony.

When asked what he wants the world to know, Akim did not hesitate.

“I want them to know that we were there. That we lived there. That we worked, and studied, and built lives, and loved Ukrainian people — and that most of the time, we were invisible unless we were being hurt. And I want them to know that when the war came, that country showed exactly how it felt about us. Not in secret. In front of cameras. In front of the world.”

“The world should not forget that.”

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A Note from the Editor — Real News Online

Our reporter did not go looking for this story. It found him — on a train platform in Dachau, Germany, on the morning of June 12th, 2026, in the form of a Nigerian man named Monday who stopped to help with heavy luggage and spoke two sentences that changed the direction of the day.

We were among those who believed that support for Ukraine was, at its core, a defense of democratic principles — a belief we held in good faith, and still hold today, but:

We no longer hold that belief unconditionally. What Monday said on that train, what Akim described face to face, what the African Union documented, what Human Rights Watch put on the record, what those videos from the Ukrainian border showed the entire world — these are not footnotes. They are the historical character of a country that the United States has chosen to fund, arm, and defend without condition and without accountability.

We support President Trump’s refusal to issue a blank check to Kyiv. We support every American legislator who has demanded accountability before another dollar is transferred. Suffering does not exempt a nation from its obligations to human decency — and the taxpayers of the United States deserve to know exactly what their money has been funding.

Monday made it out. Akim made it out. How many did not? That question deserves an answer before any further appropriation is signed.

— The Editor, Real News Online