Russia admits moving a million civilians ‘for their own good’
Moscow insists people are well looked after but Kyiv claims many are being held against their will
MORE than one million Ukrainians have been moved into Russia since the start of the war, as Moscow yesterday offered the first official figure for the mass transfer of people from occupied cities such as Mariupol.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said they were “evacuated” for their own good and given medical assistance, but Kyiv has long claimed that its citizens are being forcibly deported to farflung parts of the country or put in camps and used as “hostages”.
Separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and troops in Russian-occupied areas in the south have organised a stream of buses for residents who have come to see it as the only alternative to staying in the middle of a warzone.
“The refugees are offered medical and psychological help,” Mr Lavrov told China’s Xinhua news agency in an interview published yesterday.
He said that more than 9,500 temporary facilities have been set up across Russia to host the new arrivals.
Earlier this month Ukraine said 800,000 people had been taken to Russia against their will, but that now appears to have been an underestimate. In a speech to the UN Security Council at the time, Sergiy Kyslytsia, Ukraine’s envoy, described the transfers as “kidnapping that requires a resolute response by the international community”, comparing it to similar tactics used in Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Temporary facilities in Russian border areas were already overflowing with Ukrainian refugees soon after the start of the war, with people often put on trains to remote regions.
Speaking to The Telegraph at the time, many people said they had no money or mobile phones with them and had little idea about whether they even had a choice about where they were going.
In response, a few brave activists have been helping Ukrainians leave Russia again so that they can join relatives in the west of the country or elsewhere in Europe.
Igor Zhulimov initially crowdfunded purchases of clothes and basic necessities for the 400 or so Mariupol residents who ended up being posted to a sanatorium in Penza, more than 300 miles away from Ukraine.
But before long the lawyer was approached by a few asking how they could leave Russia. “People do want to leave but a lot of them are worried,” Mr Zhulimov said.
He had been told by the sanatorium’s administration earlier this month that the refugees “were free to go wherever they want”.
So he and another activist crowdfunded train tickets to St Petersburg and then arranged for the Ukrainians to be met by volunteers and escorted by car to the border with Estonia.
So far the activists have helped more than 50 people leave the refugee camp.
Mr Zhulimov said the scheme was a way for him and others to protest about what he described as Russia’s “criminal” war in Ukraine.
However, operations were suspended yesterday after Irina Gurskaya, a volunteer, was detained for a night in a police station following an anonymous complaint.
Earlier this week, Mr Zhulimov’s car was vandalised and the front doors of the two activists’ homes were spraypainted with the phrase: “An accomplice of Ukrainian Nazis lives here.”
Russian state news outlets reported yesterday that 25 civilians including six children had been evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks – the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance – although there was no confirmation from Kyiv.
There are believed to be hundreds of soldiers and civilians sheltering in the plant in increasingly desperate condi
‘This is a perfect illustration of the realities of occupation – curtailed freedom, limited rights and utter ruin’
tions. The rest of Mariupol has now fallen under Russian control. Yesterday, it emerged that separatist troops had been distributing leaflets setting out new “rules of conduct” for residents, including ordering everyone to go through a “verification” process to make sure they are not “Ukrainian militia” if they want to stay in the city.
The leaflet also tells residents that they cannot withdraw cash from banks or drive their cars.
“This is a perfect illustration of current and future realities in Mariupol under the Russian occupation regime. Restricted mobility, curtailed freedom , limited rights and utter ruin. Total control. True ghetto,” said Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor.
Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, said on Friday that all men from the outskirts of Mariupol were being taken to a filtration camp in a separatist-held area and kept there for a week before they were allowed back home.
In order to return, they must show papers proving they have been vetted, and not everyone is allowed back.
Last month, Julia Paevska, founder of a volunteer ambulance corps, was snatched by Russian troops after she stopped to treat a civilian on March 16, her teenage daughter told The Telegraph. Anna-Sophia Puzanova, who is now in Brussels, said she has not heard from her mother since, but she has been seen in Russian propaganda videos.
Such stories add to fears that Russia is using Ukrainians in territory it captures as hostages for prisoner exchanges.
Yesterday Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said she had secured the release of seven soldiers and seven civilians. She did not reveal how many Russians troops had been returned to Moscow.
“We know there are more than a thousand hostages there [in Russia] including almost 500 women,” Ms Vereshchuk told the BBC on Friday.
“That’s why they captured all these hostages – civilians, women, employees of local councils, to try and use them.”
People are not the only thing that Russia is accused of stealing from Ukraine. Yesterday an agriculture minister said that “several hundred thousand tons of grain” had been stolen.
Earlier this week authorities in Mariupol said more than 2,000 paintings from the city’s art museum had been taken to Donetsk.