Putin ‘deports Ukrainians to camps’: Russia is accused of putting refugees in ‘filtration’ centres

118

View
comments

Vladimir Putin has been accused of deporting Ukrainians to ‘filtration’ centres before forcibly taking them to remote Siberian towns after confiscating their phones and documents. 

‘Several thousand’ people have so-far been taken, Mariupol city council claimed, before being processed through ‘filtration camps’ and sent to ‘remote cities’ in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free. 

Russian news agencies have reported that buses carrying hundreds of refugees from the besieged southeastern port city Mariupol had arrived in Russia in recent days. Moscow officials also said a trainload of over 280 Ukrainians were being ‘rescued’ from Mariupol, showing footage of them thanking Russian forces. 

Mariupol mayor Vadym Boichenko likened the alleged forced deportations to transportation of prisoners by the Nazi regime during World War II. Boichenko said: ‘What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people. It is hard to imagine that in the 21st century people can be forcibly taken to another country.’ 

Mariupol is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency after being encircled by Russian troops, cut off from energy, food and water supplies and facing a relentless bombardment. 

Russian Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev late on Sunday demanded that Ukrainian troops and ‘foreign mercenaries’ in the Black Sea port Mariupol lay down their weapons and surrender in return for letting tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the heavily besieged city leave safely.  

Mizintsev said those who laid down their arms and raised white flags would be allowed to leave via ‘humanitarian corridors’. Civilians would then be evacuated afterwards. He gave Ukraine until 5am to respond. 

Daria Morozova, of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said that all of those who remained behind would face a military tribunal for ‘all the crimes of the Ukrainian national battalions.’ She said inspectors would be sent into the city once it had been ‘completely cleansed’ by Russian troops. 

But Mariupol rejected the demands within minutes, with Pyotr Andryushenko – an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol – saying that Russian promises of amnesty could not be trusted and that troops defending the city were determined to fight down to the last man.  

Mariupol city hall official Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Sunday that residents of areas under Russian control were being sent to ‘filtration camps’ and that Moscow’s men were ‘checking their phones and seizing their Ukrainian documents’. 

The Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine on Sunday said that 2,973 people have been evacuated from Mariupol since March 5, including 541 over the last 24 hours. 

US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told CNN the deportation accounts were ‘disturbing’ and ‘unconscionable’ if true but that Washington had not confirmed them. 

Thomas-Greenfield added: ‘To force people from Ukraine to go into Russia is abolsutel unacceptable; it’s unconscionable. It’s something we need to confirm, but I don’t put it past the Russians to take such a horrific action. That would be another escalation, but not beyond the realm of possibility given horrible’ Russian pressure on Mariupol has been.  

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss condemned the ‘abduction and deportation’ of Ukrainians from the besieged city of Mariupol, in a move that has been likened to Nazi Germany. She said she was ‘appalled’ by the reports and vowed for Putin to be ‘held to account’ for his treatment of civilians during the invasion.

Meanwhile Russia’s offer of an amnesty was made just hours after a Russian missile strike hit a school sheltering some 400 people, though there was no immediate word on casualties. Last week, Russia had bombed a theatre in the city being used to shelter children – potentially trapping hundreds of people in underground bomb shelters. There is still no word on casualties from that strike either. 

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Monday decried Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian port city Mariupol as ‘a massive war crime’, as the bloc discussed imposing more sanctions on Moscow. ‘[They are] destroying everything, bombarding and killing everybody,’ Borrell said at a meeting of EU foreign ministers. 

Following Russia’s offer of an amnesty in Mariupol, Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk called on Russia to stop ‘wasting time on eight pages of letters’. She said Moscow should open humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave the city instead of using them as bargaining chips. 

Vereshchuk told news outlet Ukrainska Pravda: ‘There can be no talk of any surrender, laying down of arms. We have already informed the Russian side about this.’ Mizintsev warned of a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ that will be faced by all those who remain behind after Moscow’s deadline for surrender elapsed.   

Russia and Ukraine have made agreements throughout the war on humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians, but have accused each other of frequent violations of those.  

Meanwhile on Friday feared Chechen special forces are fighting house-to-house in besieged Mariupol while ‘hundreds’ of women and children remain trapped in the rubble of a city theatre destroyed by Russian invaders.

Video said to have been released by pro-Putin Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov shows heavily armed fighters from the region pounding a high-rise building in the bombed-out city during a fierce gunfight with Ukrainian soldiers.

The propaganda video then cuts before showing some of the Chechen fighters emerging from the building with children in their arms while supposedly ‘liberating’ civilians. The footage emerged as hundreds of people were still feared trapped under the rubble of a theatre in the devastated city. Evacuees have also told of the ‘hell’ they have been subjected to at the hands of Vladimir Putin‘s men.

Russian troops had by Friday reached the city centre and civilians remain hiding in bunkers while fighters battle on the streets. Mariupol Mayor adym Boichenko said: ‘Tanks and machine gun battles continue. There’s no city centre left. There isn’t a small piece of land in the city that doesn’t have signs of war.

Nick Osychenko, the CEO of a Mariupol TV station, said that as he fled the city with six members of his family, aged between 4 and 61, he saw dead bodies on nearly every block.

‘We were careful and didn’t want the children to see the bodies, so we tried to shield their eyes,’ he said. ‘We were nervous the whole journey. It was frightening, just frightening.’

Serhiy Taruta, a Ukrainian politician, said that around 130 people had been rescued from the theatre but hundreds of others are unaccounted for – possibly buried under rubble in one part of the bomb shelter, and cannot be evacuated because rescue services have been destroyed by Russian troops.

‘No one understands. Services that are supposed to help are demolished, rescue and utility services… are physically destroyed. A lot of doctors have been killed. This means that all the survivors of the bombing will either die under the ruins of the theater, or have already died,’ he wrote on Facebook. 

Dmytro Gurin, a Ukrainian MP from Mariupol, told the BBC that some people have managed to evacuate but that others are trapped in the shelter and rescuers are struggling to reach them because Russian troops continue to shell it. A rescue mission is underway, he insisted. 

Meanwhile survivors of the siege who managed to flee described the city as ‘hell’, saying that people are being left to bleed or burn to death in the streets because doctors cannot reach them and hospitals have been destroyed, with the bodies covered by a thin layer of soil in makeshift burials. 

Svitlana Zlenko, who said she left the city with her son on Tuesday last week, described how she spent days sheltering in a school building – melting snow to cook pasta to eat while living in constant terror of Russian bombs which flew overhead ‘every day and every night’.  

She described how a bomb hit the school last week, wounding a woman in the hip with a piece of shrapnel. ‘She was lying on the first floor of the high school all night and prayed for poison so that she would not feel pain,’ Svitlana said. ‘[She] was taken by the Red Cross within a day, I pray to God she is well.’

She added: ‘There is no food, no medicine, if there is no snow with such urban fights, people will not be able to go out to get water, people have no water left. Pharmacies, grocery stores – everything is robbed or burned.

‘The dead are not taken out. Police recommend to the relatives of those who died of a natural death, to open the windows and lay the bodies on the balcony. I know you think you understand, but you will never understand unless you were there. I pray that this will not happen again in any of the cities of Ukraine, or of the world.’

Russia kept up its bombardment of other Ukrainian cities on Monday, hitting a shopping mall and several apartments in the capital Kyiv in the early hours – reducing the former to rubble. Bombings in the surrounded city of Sumy also hit an ammonia plant, sparking an evacuation.