Gnomad » Tue Mar 08, 2022 11:12 am wrote:It would be quite unusual for civilians to voluntarily flee to the attacking country, in a war. Usually they try to go the opposite way... Anyone have any examples of such a situation in history?
Todays news said that now Russia has agreed to open corridors towards Poland as well.
Refugees have started to arrive in Finland too, also several civilians have organized buses to Polish-Ukrainian border, and are bringing people here.
Depending on how we define attacking country:
- minimum 1/3 of those fleeing Kosovo during Serbian anti-UCK/KLA actions and the subsequent U.S. bombing were going into Serbia (that's even NATO saying back then, but in footnotes to the main Western coverage claiming a genocide of hundreds of thousands of Albanians, which didn't happen).
- 2-3 million have left Donbass (on either side of the line between Kiev forces and Donbass republics), about half going to Russia.
Presumably the key factor, for those who have a choice in the matter, would be whether those fleeing identify primarily as Russian/Russian-speaking or Ukrainian/western-Ukrainian. Above all, on which side they have relatives.
Not everything is as clear-cut as the situation for, let's say, Jewish residents at the start of Barbarossa. They wanted to be on the Soviet side of the line, whatever you may say about life on that side.
This region has been a mess of very complicated ethnic warfare dating back to the late 19th, early 20th century.
During the war after the Russian revolution, which is called the Russian Civil War although it was a lot more than that, the territory of Ukraine simultaneously had more than one White counter-revolutionary army engaging in pogroms while fighting three or four Ukrainian nationalist armies that were also pogroming, fighting each other, and fighting Polish defense forces. The Bolshevik Red Army was being built literally at train stations at the front and of course fought all of the above. The Makhno-led Ukrainian anarchists provided the key offensive on behalf of the Bolsheviks, cutting off the Whites from the rear, which in turn allowed the Red Army to move in and crush everyone including the anarchists. And of course various forces from the Western allies were dispatched in support of whomever they could mark temporarily as allied on their scorecards. And before that, in the earlier phases, there were German forces trying to hold it down, even after the Brest-Litovsk treaty supposedly ended the war in March 1918, and they engaged against various until the German Empire collapsed in November 1918.
So in this group of situations, who were the attackers and where did civilians flee? Wherever they could, if they had that option. For most, the only choice available was to starve in place. They could hope they didn't get shot as they handed the occupier du jour of their land any grain that might have been left over from the last occupier's requisitions.
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