- The Russians are forcibly sending Ukrainians to remote regions of Russia, Ukrainian officials said.
- The Kremlin plans to send them as far as Siberia and the Arctic Circle, The i reported.
- Almost 100,000 Ukrainians will be sent to these regions, The i said, citing a Kremlin document.
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Russia plans to send nearly 100,000 Ukrainians as far as Siberia and the Arctic Circle, British newspaper The i reported, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned of “special filter camps” for captured people.
A Kremlin document cited by The i shows that last month Russia issued an emergency order to forcibly transfer 95,739 Ukrainians to distant regions of Russia.
The document suggests that Ukrainians are not being sent to big cities like Moscow or St. Petersburg, but to remote areas thousands of kilometers from their homes.
According to The i.
Some Ukrainians are also being sent as far as Sakhalin – a Russian island in the Pacific Ocean north of Japan – The i reported.
Regions were reportedly instructed to notify Moscow of new arrivals on a monthly basis.
The report comes after Ukrainian officials accused Russia of taking thousands of people from Mariupol – a heavily bombed southern port city in Ukraine – to so-called “filtration camps” along the border before forcibly relocating them to faraway regions of Russia.
In a speech to the Lithuanian parliament on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said: “There are mass deportations of people from the occupied territories. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been deported.”
“They are placed in special filtration camps,” he added. “Documents are taken from them. They are interrogated and humiliated. It is not known how many were killed.”
A makeshift reception center where evacuees take shelter in a former sports hall in Taganrog, Rostov region, Russia, March 21, 2022. Fedor Larin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Mariupol City Council said last month that Russians had kidnapped 20,000 residents of the besieged city.
Several Mariupol women who said they were forced to go to the “filtration camps” have since spoken to media outlets including The Guardian and The Washington Post about their experiences.
An unnamed woman told the Post that she was taken by bus to the Ukrainian border town of Novoazovsk after Russian soldiers found her in an underground bunker.
Arriving in Novoazovsk, the woman told the Post she was interrogated by men who said they were part of Russia’s FSB security service. She said she was photographed and fingerprinted and also had to surrender her phone and passwords.
“At all stages of the journey we were treated like prisoners or criminals. I felt like a sack of potatoes being thrown around,” the woman told the Post.
Another unnamed woman told The Guardian that she, along with “two or three hundred” others, was interrogated and her personal belongings confiscated at the “filtration camp” in Novoazovsk.
“It was very humiliating,” she told The Guardian of the interrogation.
Both women were able to break away from their groups and escape to Europe, according to the Post and The Guardian.
Russia has denied that anyone from Ukraine is being resettled against their will, the Post reported.
Last month, the Kremlin said it had rescued 420,000 people “from dangerous regions of Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” and evacuated them to Russia, according to the Post.