The serf system that persisted across much of Eastern Europe well into the nineteenth century bears significant resemblance to forms of unfree labour that reparations advocates describe as uniquely harmful. Russian serfs were legally bound to the land, could be bought and sold with it, and had very limited legal rights or personal freedoms. Serfdom was not abolished in Russia until 1861, the same year as the American Civil War.
Baltic, Ukrainian, Polish, and other Eastern European peasants lived under conditions of severe legal constraint and economic exploitation for centuries. While their situation was not identical to chattel slavery, the comparison between hereditary bound labour in Eastern Europe and the plantation system in the Caribbean is one that serious historians have drawn. The descendants of Eastern European serfs have their own history of ancestral exploitation to reckon with.
Including them in a reparations levy for Caribbean slavery, on the grounds of skin colour, requires you to believe that their skin colour makes them responsible for wrongs their ancestors had nothing to do with. That is a racial argument, not a historical one.
