Authors

Discussion

This paper examines Ukrainian exile trajectories during the first decade of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict (2014–2024), placing them in the context of kinship networks that extend across both Russia and Poland. Based on 51 interviews with exiled Ukrainians in Poland and Hungary, the study shows how Soviet-era ties in Russia and more recent anchors in Poland were used as resources in exile, reshaped through displacement in the different waves of exile, or sometimes abandoned in wartime. It also examines how the two waves of exile interacted, with first-wave exiles sometimes offering refuge to those of the second wave, both in Russia and Poland.

Exile decisions appear less shaped by geopolitical alignments than by the lived geography of families. They reveal the coexistence of inherited and newly built networks, which were activated or rejected depending on shifting perceptions of safety, opportunity, and trust. These networks are made of layers of influence, superimposed and sedimented over the long durée. They combine the legacies of Soviet internal migrations, the circulations of the 2010s towards the EU, and the ruptures of war after 2014, all of which converge in the lived experiences of displaced families.

By foregrounding kinship as a central category of analysis, this contribution challenges narratives that reduce Ukrainian mobility to binary East/West orientations or to state-centric framings of “refugee flows.” Instead, it situates exile within overlapping historical temporalities that destabilise neat geopolitical boundaries. This approach helps decentre dominant state-led perspectives on forced migration in the region, showing how Ukrainians themselves mobilise, reinterpret, or discard ties across contested spaces. The paper also contributes to the decolonisation of post-Soviet studies by exposing how the legacies of the Soviet migration system, and the violent erasures of Polish-Ukrainian pasts, continue to shape possibilities of refuge today. It suggests that attention to these hidden genealogies of mobility opens a different map of Eastern Europe, one that is not defined solely by borders or states but by relational, multi-layered geographies.