A bus carrying Ukrainians evacuated in May from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol arriving in the village of Bezimenne, closer to the Russian border, in May. Credit … Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters
Russian authorities have “interrogated, detained and forcibly deported” between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes in Russian territory, often in isolated regions of the Far East, he said United States Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Wednesday.
Mr. Blinken described the transfers as “a grave violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians” and “a war crime.”
Russia has acknowledged that 1.5 million Ukrainians are now in Russia, but has assured that they were evacuated for their own safety.
Ukrainian officials have long sounded the alarm about Russia’s deportations, and President Volodymyr Zelensky described them last month as “one of Russia’s most heinous war crimes.” Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said, the deportations have included more than 200,000 children.
Testimony given to The New York Times and other media by deportees fleeing Russia has included descriptions of so-called leak sites and reports of interrogations, beatings and torture of those believed to have links to the armed forces. of Ukraine and disappearances.
European officials have described the leak sites as schools, sports centers and cultural institutions in parts of Ukraine recently confiscated by Russian forces.
From these places, many Ukrainians have been transported to destinations across Russia, often to remote regions of Ukraine, near China or Japan, according to witnesses.
Some U.S. officials have previously expressed concern about the deportations, but have only made vague assessments of the scale.
Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said during a speech in Vienna in May that many witnesses had given detailed accounts of Russia’s “brutal interrogations” in leaks. to which at least thousands of Ukrainians had been forced. a, and deportations of the order of at least tens of thousands.
Wednesday’s statement by Mr. Blinken also cited reports that Russian forces were “deliberately” separating Ukrainian children from their parents and kidnapping others from orphanages. Witnesses and survivors, according to the statement, describe “frequent threats, harassment and incidents of torture by Russian security forces.”
In some cases, the statement said, the passports of Ukrainians were confiscated and instead Russian passports were issued to them, “in an apparent effort to change the demographic composition of parts of Ukraine.”
Mr. Blinken said the United States is calling for an immediate halt to the deportations and for Russian authorities to release the detainees and allow them to return home. Independent observers should be allowed, according to the statement, access to alleged leak sites and places where Ukrainians have been deported.
His statement came on the eve of the Ukrainian Responsibility Conference, which is being held in The Hague on Thursday. The conference, organized by the Dutch government, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and the European Commission, aims to ensure that war crimes in Ukraine do not go unpunished.
“President Putin and his government will not be able to participate in these systematic abuses with impunity,” Blinken said. “Responsibility is a must.”