Saturday 14 May 2022 12:43 AM Putin's Stalinist deportation plan for 2MILLION Ukrainians trends now
Russia planned the forcible deportation of up to two million Ukrainians before launching its invasion, according to top-level Kremlin documents obtained by the Daily Mail.
The papers disclose how 1,310 transit centres were set up to handle captured Ukrainians in a sinister move that has been compared to mass deportations of the Soviet Union’s darkest days.
As part of this chilling policy, about 1.2million Ukrainians have already been taken to Russia – some ferried more than 5,000 miles to remote villages in Siberia, close to the North Korean border or even to a Russian island in the Pacific near Japan.
The transit facilities and forced evacuations into far-flung parts of Russia are linked to a ruthless system of so-called ‘filtration camps’ set up on occupied Ukrainian terrain to seize those deemed enemies of their state and funnel others into the country.
Safety: Four-year-old Alisa in Zaporizhzhia after she became separated from her mum in a filtration camp. The papers disclose how 1,310 transit centres were set up to handle captured Ukrainians in a sinister move that has been compared to mass deportations of the Soviet Union’s darkest days
Ukrainian officials have revealed that thousands of men rounded up by Vladimir Putin’s troops are also being used as forced labour. They are ordered to search destroyed Ukrainian buildings for unexploded munitions and to get rid of evidence of mass slaughter.
‘They send them like human shields to walk around buildings that are not fully destroyed and might contain explosives,’ said Liudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman.
Forced labourers are also ordered to collect, burn or bury the bodies of fellow Ukrainians – such as those among the 600 killed in bombing while hiding in the basement of Mariupol Theatre two months ago.
‘This is just horrible,’ said Denisova. ‘Just imagine: they must remove the bodies, pile them up or put them in bags, then take them somewhere to be dumped in mass graves. It is exactly like Hitler’s atrocities.’
Ukrainian officials have revealed that thousands of men rounded up by Vladimir Putin’s troops are also being used as forced labour
In March, the Daily Mail detailed the first eye-witness account of Putin’s sinister system of forced evacuations and the use of filtration camps – a tactic pioneered by Stalin. Now our investigations can reveal that:
Russian officials are screening all Ukrainians on captured land for government or military links, forcing them to have documentary proof of passing through ‘filtration’; The Kremlin is taking all their mobile phone data, along with fingerprints and photographs, sparking fears such information will be fed into a Chinese-style surveillance system using facial recognition technology that can monitor people’s future movement; Ukrainians who have evacuated to Russia are being pressured to remain there, and warned they face prison if they try to go home; An estimated one in ten people ‘fail’ the filtration system – and disappear into a network of camps and prisons notorious for torture run by Putin’s stooges in the self-declared Donbas republics; One man who escaped a camp told of being beaten and tortured with electric shocks in a secretive prison meant to hold 750 inmates but had 3,000 crammed inside; Sweeps by Russian forces have rounded up all men from some occupied villages, taking them into captivity and subjecting them to forced labour; About 2,000 children have been removed from orphanages in the Donbas region, provoking fears they will be given to Russian families after Putin announced that rules for adoptions from Ukraine will be eased.The horrors of Putin’s filtration policies were highlighted last week when a four-year-old girl called Alisa arrived in Zaporizhzhia, a city in south Ukraine, after her evacuation from Mariupol.
This little girl – who was filmed pleading for help as she sheltered in a bunker beneath the city’s besieged Azovstal steel plant – had endured a 29-hour bus journey with just a backpack containing some clothes and a note from her mother Viktoria Obdina asking relatives to care for her child.
Viktoria disappeared after the pair were separated in a key filtration camp at Bezymianny, 20 miles from Mariupol. Her ‘crime’ was to be a doctor tending to Ukrainian fighters wounded in the battle for Azovstal.
Russian forces had interrogated them and looked for any links they had with the Ukrainian government – such as pictures on phones, patriotic tattoos or any signs lingering on their body of weapon use.
One of Alisa’s fellow bus passengers said: ‘They checked us, they undressed us, they looked at us.’
Women escaping the hell of Mariupol have told also of being forced to strip naked and being questioned alone for several hours by heavily-armed men demanding access to all data on their phones.
For some, the process takes just a few hours but others are held for weeks. One man said he saw a woman led away for possessing a pro-Ukraine poster, then was warned the only way out was to join Moscow’s army and send his family to Russia. ‘People have told us they have been beaten during this filtration procedure,‘ said Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of Kyiv’s Centre for Civil Liberties. ‘They told us they heard people are being killed but it needs further investigation.’
Filtration camps were used after the Second World War when Stalin’s goons screened Soviet prisoners of war and citizens who had been held by the Nazis, sending almost 300,000 into gulags for supposed ideological impurities.
The policy was revived between 1994 and 2003 during Moscow’s two wars against Muslim separatists in Chechnya, leading to global condemnation of ‘unspeakable’ abuses such as mass internment, rape and torture. Many detainees were never seen again.
Tetiana Lomakina, the Ukrainian president’s adviser on humanitarian corridors, said it was becoming impossible to move around occupied areas without passing through the filtration process which is being ‘jointly conducted by Russian military and intelligence’.
She said: ‘The main goal is to find and exterminate all Ukrainians who have connections with the armed forces of Ukraine, officials or local authorities.
‘But also, during the questioning, they try to scare people, to make sure they do not go to territories controlled by Ukraine.’
Documents passed to the Mail by Ukrainian officials not only reveal details of the Kremlin’s strategy for refugees, with officials across the country
