1.6m Ukrainians ‘deported to Russia’

THE US has called on Russia to immedi- ately release up to 1.6million Ukrainians it has forced out of their home country.

Secretary of state Antony Blinken also cited reports that Moscow was putting Ukrainian children up for adoption and ‘disappearing’ thousands of others.

He said yesterday: ‘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.’

Mr Blinken said ahead of a conference in The Hague today to address ‘accountability’ in the conflict, that estimates suggest Russian authorities have forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, to remote parts of Russia.

He added reports indicated Moscow was ‘deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents and abducting others from orphanages before putting them up for adoption in Russia’. He said the country was also ‘detaining or disappearing thousands of civilians who do not pass “filtration”’ – camps designed to search for Ukrainian nationalists and soldiers. Critics have highlighted that the deportation and long-term detention strongly mirror Stalin-era tactics for those deemed a threat to the USSR.

The 1949 Geneva Conventions, which define international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in conflict, prohibit mass forcible transfers of civilians during a conflict to the territory of the occupying power, classifying it as a war crime. Multiple war crime investigations are already under way.