The international response to the war in Ukraine has sparked unprecedented international support. The extend and scale of refugee welcome has not been witnessed ever before, while the levels of funding, live media coverage, military and political assistance have reached record levels. However, the underlying representation of war-affected people in media narratives has not undergone a critical shift when compared to historical conflict coverage, even though a displaced person has transformed from a “distant other” to one’s neighbour, as a refugee lemma has come to denote people coming from a European nation for the first time in decades. I argue that regardless of the geographical positioning and proximity of the Ukraine war, the modes of representation of this armed conflict in traditional media is still rooted in colonial narratives, corresponding to the de-facto fossilized humanitarian response on the ground. Despite a different nature, proximity, and unusual “familiarity” of the Ukraine war, with seemingly much bigger levels of acceptance shown towards the conflict-affected people, the representation of the crisis in the media has not undergone a critical shift, reinforcing dominant narratives historically witnessed in other conflict settings. While the Western media tend to agree that the war in Ukraine is a colonial war, pointing at the role of Russia as the coloniser, this degree projects tackles the expressions of Western neocolonialism in Ukraine’s coverage, striving to identify how the ongoing media narratives mirror the representations of conflict and disaster transplanted from other humanitarian contexts.