Italians weren't "white" when they first came to the US, either.

It's not about the Ukrainians directly. On the more 'civil' side of this discourse it's mostly claims that this will become a general asylum or registration center (which it won't) and/or that there'll be a lot of crime, often accompanied by sources featuring African people.

This flows directly into the less civil side of the discussion, which ranges from conspiracy theories of EU or WEF-planned repopulation to all out etno-nationalism. Our city has a rich history of voting literal nazis into the council. There's talk of storming the city council and all that.

Sometimes, a better word for racism is tribalism, since it does not always stem from skin color. Tribes delineate among infinite lines, but common ones are wealth, religion (or customs), lineage, education, etc, and some of those might even overlap.

It's same everywhere. Fear of the unknown, coping with own failure via blaming someone weaker, different language and of course at least in EU a lot of hatred due to desinformations.

Of course more descriptive word would be just xenophobia combined with copium addiction.

Slavs have been discriminated against quite terribly over history.

‘White’ is just a category invented by Anglos and other Germanics (including Scandis, Franks, excluding Slavs and Jews) to lump together the ‘good sort’ of light skinned people away from dark skinned people and the ‘bad sort’ of light skinned people.

If you want to get deeper into ethnic speculation, I suspect it’s because Slavs have historically absorbed non-negligible amounts of ‘other’ groups such as Turkic, Iranic and Mongol; and this sets them apart from the more insulated Germanic groups who perhaps feel it makes them superior. Look at Nazi views on Aryanism and how Slavs were considered impure (funnily enough, except Bohemians, Croats and Ukrainians for political reasons… there was a war on)

Thinking that racism has to do (only) with skin colour is a typical American misconception.

Hitler considered the Slavs the be a "race" (an inferior one that ought to be enslaved).