Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian troops have deported at least 500,000 Ukrainian citizens from Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine to Russia.
“This is deportation. This is what the worst totalitarian regimes of the past did,” he said, in an address to Portugal’s parliament today. He told the Portuguese lawmakers to consider that the half-million figure is twice the population of Porto.
Zelensky claimed that deported Ukrainians are “deprived of means of communication” and that the Russian authorities seized their identification documents.
“They are distributed to the remote regions of Russia. The occupiers set up special filtration camps to distribute people. Some of those who get there are simply killed. Girls are raped,” he added.
The Ukrainian authorities have warned, since the earliest days of the invasion, about Russian deportation efforts.
Ukrainian military intelligence said in a Facebook post in late March that officers working for Russia’s FSB intelligence agency at that camp separate Ukrainian troops and law-enforcement officers from the rest of the group. Those people are then transported to Rostov and Krasnodar in Russia.
“There is indisputable evidence of inhuman treatment of Ukrainians, failure to provide medical care. There are problems with food supply,” the post said.
Tetiana Lomakina, a Zelensky adviser, told the Kyiv Independent that Russian forces shell areas they occupy to intimidate Ukrainian civilians into going along with Russian deportation schemes instead of fleeing themselves.
She added that the Kremlin might next bring Russians into occupied areas of Ukraine, so that “they would be able to better control the situation in the territories they are trying to seize.”
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield shared an ominous warning about the filtration camps at a U.N. Security Council debate in early April.
“I do not need to spell out what these so-called ‘filtration camps’ are reminiscent of. It’s chilling and we cannot look away.”