Doing a quick HN search for "ukraine", then sorting by Date - stories are actually rather scarce (especially if you ignore ones with an obvious "drone" / "robot" / "cyber" in the title), and upvotes for stories are scarce too. I'll guess that darn few of 'em ever made it to HN's front page.

Also noteworthy - the Russia/Ukraine thing is pretty darn new, novel, and has major economic impacts on billions of people (thanks to food & energy prices).

Vs. "Israel war" was an ancient trope back when the Fall of Babylon and Edict of Cyrus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Cyrus ) were breaking news.

Did you flag those stories as off topic when they were posted? Volunteer based moderation is never going to be perfectly consistent or reliable - but that fact that it wasn't perfect before doesn't change the posting guidelines.

There was an interesting article from Cloudflare posted earlier - but that has a technical angle rather than just being general current affairs.

Users are the ones who flag things. If they decide something is far-enough off topic, then it will get flagged. It doesn't necessarily follow any deterministic pattern.

Russia-Ukraine stories were almost always removed.