The office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine collects information on the number of Ukrainians forcibly displaced to the Russian Federation and records it as war crimes.

People are taken out in unknown directions / photo REUTERS

Forcibly exported to the Russian Federation, Ukrainians who agree to work for the occupiers are prohibited from leaving their place of stay for 2 years.

According to an UNIAN correspondent, Lyudmila Denisova, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada, said this during a briefing.

She cited data from the Russian Federation on the number of deported Ukrainian citizens.

“According to the Russian Federation, today they confirmed that 402,000 have already been taken out of Ukraine, of which 84,000 are children. Yesterday there were 366,000. And now we don’t know what happened to them … We cannot say that the numbers are correct or wrong. But we can make an assumption that they are being taken out. There are testimonies of citizens who called us and told us where they were taken, and that there are still many people with them who are being taken out in unknown directions,” Denisova said.

According to her, we are talking about the removal of people from the territories controlled by Ukraine – these are Volnovakha, Mariupol, Stanytsia Luhanska and other cities. That is, we are talking about the citizens of Ukraine.

“We learned that they are kept in filtration camps. First in the Donetsk region, then they are taken to the Russian Federation. Those who have no relatives in the Russian Federation are sent to filtration camps. They are taken to Omsk, Tomsk, Sakhalin … Those who agrees to work, they give a certificate that they cannot leave there for 2 years,” Denisova said.

She stressed that such forced removal of citizens is a violation of Article 3 of the Convention for the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and Art. 9 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The Ombudswoman noted that it is possible that there are not as many citizens deported from Ukraine as Russia claims, and these are propaganda actions.

“This is their data. The authorities are dealing with this issue. We record this as war crimes. As an ombudsman, I pass all the data to the High Commissioner for Human Rights twice a day. They used all possible levers of influence on the Russian Federation to find out the circumstances under which they took citizens, number. And our government is negotiating the return of people,” Denisova said.

Earlier it became known that the invaders forcibly deported almost 6,000 residents of Mariupol to the filtration camps of the Russian Federation .

(C)UNIAN 2022