Senators Marco Rubio and Tim Kaine asked President Biden to investigate whether Russia’s forced deportation and mass detention of Ukrainians constitute genocide or crimes against humanity, in a letter this afternoon.
The two lawmakers urged Biden to increase U.S. efforts to investigate Russian filtration camps in Eastern Ukraine, also pointing to the State Department’s formation of an “Atrocity Crime Advisory Group” with the U.K. and the EU.
“This effort should include investigations of filtration camps in order to determine if such camps have evidence of crimes against humanity or genocide,” they wrote.
They continued, citing reports on the conditions within the camps:
Despite their sanitized, euphemistic name, these camps have similarities with earlier Soviet efforts at destroying non-Russian ethnicities. Public reporting suggests that these camps are the earliest indications of coordinated, state-directed atrocities against the Ukrainian people. Escapees from these camps describe ghetto-like conditions where Russian authorities seek to identify individuals with ties to the Ukrainian military, journalists, or civil society – including even searching for tattoos that indicate sympathy for Ukrainian nationhood. Some reports estimate as many as 400,000 Ukrainians have been processed by these camps, including through forcible deportations, to work in remote regions of Russia, provide support for the Russian forces occupying their own country, and have been tortured. If the history of Russia’s use of filtration camps in Chechnya is any indication, it is possible that many of these individuals face the prospect of mass violations of their human rights.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement in July calling on Russia “to immediately halt its systematic ‘filtration’ operations and forced deportations in Russian-controlled and held areas of Ukraine.” He added, “The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime.”
Blinken’s statement specifically cited reports indicating that Russian authorities are separating Ukrainian children from their parents and “disappearing” certain Ukrainian detainees who don’t make it through the filtration process. A top Ukrainian prosecutor had previously investigated the forced deportation of children to Russia as part of a genocide.
An unclassified U.S. intelligence assessment said in June that “those deemed most threatening during the filtration process, particularly anyone with affiliation to the military or security services, probably are detained in prisons in eastern Ukraine and Russia, though little is known about their fates.”