Russia has deported 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens from Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine in a systemic “filtration” operation, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Wednesday.
Blinken’s statement cites witness accounts of Russian authorities transporting tens of thousands of people to detention facilities in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled region in eastern Ukraine.Moscow “reportedly” stored biometric and personal data of civilians and subjected them to invasive searches, according to the statement, which notes that some Ukrainians have been coerced into signing agreements to stay in Russia.
on the protection of civilians and is a war crime,” Blinken said, drawing parallels to past Russian filtration operations in Chechnya and elsewhere. Robert Goldman, a war crimes and human rights expert at American University, said that forced deportations on the scale Blinken describes could amount to genocidal intent.
“It just adds to the sad litany of systematic violations of the most basic prohibitions that we have in the law for things that we did not think that we would see again, since World War II, but they’re happening,” he said.From 1941 to 1952, a total of half-a-million people from the Baltic states were deported to Russia. The objective of the expulsions was principally political, aimed at purging the region of anti-Soviet forces.
, as Kyiv celebrated a strike — apparently conducted with advanced Western rocket launchers — on an ammunition depot in the occupied southern region of Kherson.A slowly regenerating Russian army is making incremental gains in eastern Ukraine against valiant but underequipped Ukrainian forces. The United States and its allies are racing to
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