> When people in other countries get more defensive or sensitive to an influx of foreigners is not an indication that racism doesn't exist or race doesn't play a part at all in how they view others
People can treat foreigners in a prejudiced way without believing that they belong to a "different race". That's still "racism" provided you define "racism" in broad terms to include prejudice and discrimination based on ethnicity/nationality/language/culture/etc – but once you've done that, the concept of "race" is no longer essential to the concept of "racism".
> Yet, look at how the plight of a white population in Ukraine is seen vs. that in Syria or Yemen or even Rwanda before that.
The US government officially considers Syrians to be "white". Syria's President has pale skin and blue eyes, and many other Syrians look like he does–other Syrians have darker eyes and skin, but then so do many Europeans (southern Europeans especially). If you had seen Bashar al-Assad walking the streets of London – he lived there from 1988 to 1994 – and you didn't know who he was, could you have known he wasn't European just by looking at him? I couldn't have. So your idea that Ukrainians are "white" but Syrians are "not white" seems to me rather questionable.
I think most uncompassionate responses to the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, were not primarily motivated by the physical appearance of Syrians, but rather by their predominant religion. The same point applies to the Bosnian genocide, whose victims were Muslims of Slavic ancestry and language, physically largely indistinguishable from their Christian Serb murderers.