According to The Conversation According to Bruce Newbold, a geography professor at McMaster University, more than 6.6 million people have fled Ukraine after the Russian attack, and this number is steadily increasing. People in the age group of 18-64 years are required to stay in the country so that they can help the defense forces. Therefore, the majority of the refugees are women and children.
This Second World War After Europe The largest and fastest migration of During World War II, by 1945, about 11 million people were displaced in their own countries.
Post-war European history is also littered with migrations caused by conflict between the Soviet Union and the West.
Cold War influx of refugees
It is difficult to identify the total number of refugees resulting from these conflicts due to the scale of the movement. We know that the Cold War produced millions of refugees from communist Europe in the years immediately following World War II.
It also includes an estimated 3.5 million people who fled East Germany before the Berlin Wall was built.
An estimated two million people became refugees due to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
The Prague Spring in 1968 made about 80,000 people as refugees. It was an attempt to establish political liberalization by mass demonstrations of the people of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia). It was crushed by the Soviet Union.
Between 1991 and 2001, more than 2.4 million people became refugees because of the wars that led to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. This country later broke up and fragmented to become the countries of Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Kosovo and Bosnia.
Most Ukrainians have moved to Poland, but refugees have arrived in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Moldova. Some people from Ukraine have also gone to other countries like Canada, USA, UK and Germany.
Ukrainians are displaced or stranded
The UNHCR has estimated that more than 7 million people have been displaced in Ukraine, especially those who escaped fierce fighting in eastern Ukraine, fled to the western city of Lviv and during the siege of the capital Kyiv.
The number of refugees and displaced people in the country itself is a quarter of the population of Ukraine.
Many people are still trapped in their destroyed homes and communities. This means that they have been displaced without leaving their homes.
However, there are reports that people are returning to some areas of Ukraine after Russian forces have left those areas.
Given Ukraine’s population of 44 million, the number of refugees due to the ongoing conflict is expected to exceed the exodus during World War II.
