Page 6 - UKRRptJul22

2.0 Politics
2.1 Millions of Ukrainians displaced
After more than 100 days of war, the Russian invasion has already caused thousands of deaths and traumatized an entire nation. What’s more, it has revived many painful memories for Ukrainians. Russia plundering grain in the occupied territories, for example, is a chilling reminder of the Holodomor, the great famine orchestrated by Joseph Stalin that killed millions in the 1930s.
The scale of displacement in Ukraine also evokes the country’s difficult past. As historian Peter Gatrell recalls in a long read for Engelsberg Ideas, the displacement of populations in Ukraine is a constant throughout the 20th century. And “the current refugee crisis is the latest chapter in a history of displacement in the region that embraces two world wars and their aftermath.”
The redrawing of borders at the end of World War I, as well as the brief existence of the Ukrainian National Republic (1918–1921) had already pushed millions of Ukrainians from their homes: some fled the east of the country and the civil war, only to return. Others preferred to stay in the west, which was then under Polish authority. The interwar period saw a brief window of stability, marked in particular by an intense migration from the countryside to the cities. But this was later marred by the violence of collectivization and the famines that followed.
Ukraine saw enormous loss of life and displacement during World War II. “As in the First World War, minorities were exposed to violence, not just from the enemy, which targeted the entire Jewish population for extermination, but also from within, leading to mass expulsions and the resettlement of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in May 1944,” writes Gatrell. Once the war was over, Poland and the USSR agreed to a “voluntary” population exchange, which resulted in millions of Ukrainians being expelled from Poland to Ukraine, and vice versa, and thousands deciding to emigrate, joining the Ukrainian diasporas in the West.
“Politically, the death of Stalin in 1953 eventually paved the way for some 250,000 Crimean Tatars and their descendants to return to Ukraine. But repatriation posed legal and material difficulties,” Gatrell recalls. Indeed, Russia’s ongoing repressions against the Crimean Tatars on the occupied peninsula evokes a long history of persecution. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster caused a wave of internal displacement in 1986, soon followed by out migration after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine already had one of the largest IDP populations in the world due to the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. At present, the UN Human Rights Office reports that there are 4.7 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe. But most of those forced to flee have not left the country: Ukraine is now home to more than 8 million internally displaced persons.
6 UKRAINE Country Report XXXX 2018 www.intellinews.com