Kyiv said that Moscow deported 1.2 million people to Russia, denouncing the existence of “sorting camps” in the Russian-controlled territories in eastern Ukraine, through which these “deportees” pass.
“The United States estimates that Russian forces have transferred several thousand Ukrainians to these (screening camps), and evacuated at least tens of thousands to Russia or to Russian-controlled territory, and sometimes without informing the evacuees of their final destination.”
“We estimate that Russian forces forcibly transferred several thousand civilians to Russian territory,” he added in a speech in Vienna.
The diplomat spoke of testimonies about “brutal interrogations” accompanied by “torture” inside those “screening camps”, with the aim of “identifying anyone who has the slightest loyalty to Ukraine.”
He said that there are “many accounts talking about the confiscation of detainees’ mobile phones” and even their passports, and about obtaining “passwords under duress, and checking (their accounts on) social networks and their messages, looking for any indication of opposition to Russia’s barbaric war against Ukraine.”
“According to this information, those considered pro-Ukraine are being transferred to the so-called (Donetsk People’s Republic)” controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, “where they face a grim fate,” Carpenter said.
He stressed that “these acts constitute war crimes,” adding, “Russia knows very well” that such “forced transfers” are “contrary to international humanitarian law.”
According to Lyudmila Denisova, a Ukrainian government official, “more than 1.9 million” Ukrainians “including more than 200,000 children” have been “transferred to the Russian Federation”.
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