In a recent news release, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) counted more than 100 million people globally who have been displaced and forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution.

The staggering number of refugees has been driven by wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. In Ukraine, there’s been a massive exodus of people since Russia invaded the country in February.

Children and two adults stand in a semi-circle holding hands. One girl wears a Minnie Mouse head scarf.
Syrian children hold hands as they wait for a delivery of food and toys in an orphanage camp for displaced people run by the Turkish Red Crescent in November 2021. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
More than 6.6 million Ukrainians have fled, with the number continuing to grow. Men aged 18 to 64 have been required to remain in the country to aid in its defence, so most of the refugees are women and children.

The situation represents Europe’s biggest and most rapid exodus of people since the Second World War, when an estimated 11 million people were displaced from their home countries by 1945.

Post-war European history is also littered with refugee movements generated by conflict between the Soviet Union and the West.

Cold War refugee flows
Although it’s harder to identify the total number of refugees produced in these conflicts owing to the scale of movement, the difficulty of defining and counting refugees and shifting terminology (for example, the use of the term “refugees” instead of “displaced persons”), we know the Cold War generated millions of refugees out of Communist Europe in the years immediately following the Second World War.

This included an estimated 3.5 million who fled East Germany before the Berlin Wall was built.
The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was estimated to have produced 200,000 refugees.
The 1968 Prague Spring — an attempt by the people of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) to institute political liberalization through mass protests — was crushed by the Soviet Union, producing approximately 80,000 refugees.

Read more - https://theconversation.com/will-the-exodus-of-ukrainians-surpass-the-second-world-wars-refugee-flows-182658