kyiv accuses the Kremlin of forcibly transferring its citizens to use them “as cheap labor”
Here they treat us well, with affection, and they have fed us. It is the grateful testimony of a Ukrainian woman in her seventies, one of the between 350,000 and 500,000 people who have ended up in Russian refugee camps since the invasion began. Spaces to which, according to kyiv, she is forcibly taking her citizens and in which, Moscow replies, she helps those displaced by the war who come to them “voluntarily.”
The images broadcast this Friday by various media outlets were recorded and disseminated by Russia itself. Exactly where is unknown because there are an undetermined number of these installations both in Federation territory, near the border with the invaded country, and in the pro-Russian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk or in neighboring Belarus. The video shows for the first time the interior of these enclosures. In a pavilion, rows of beds with blankets. Russian soldiers preparing food in pots or playing with children. Refugees tearful for what they have left behind, yet apparently comforted by being alive and under a roof.
But suspicion hangs over these host areas, known as ‘filtration camps’. His story does not inspire confidence. The Kremlin began using them in the Chechnya war in 1999 to identify and purge dissidents and pro-independence guerrillas from the former republic who tried to flee among the civilian population.
Now kyiv assures that tens of thousands of people, especially from Mariupol or Chernigov, would be transferred to them without their consent and as a preliminary step, after verifying that they have no ‘inconvenient’ connections, to being ‘deported’ to depressed Russian populations economically in which “they will be employed as cheap labor” and which could not leave before two years.
The newspaper ‘The Washington Post’ collected this week the testimony of a Ukrainian woman whom Putin’s troops had “forced” to leave Mariupol and taken to one of these centers. “At all stages of the journey we were treated as captives or criminals. Once in the field, they add you to three different databases and tell you that they will take you further, but not where. And all the while they insisted that we should be thankful that they gave us a sandwich or that they had ‘liberated’ us. Released from what? »Wondered the woman, who was finally able to get rid of the transfer by proving that she had relatives who lived in a nearby town.
#Russia #filters #evacuated #Ukrainian #civilians #camps