Additionally, the official wrote on Telegram, 5,000-7,000 people remain in a filtration camp in the village of Bezimenne west of Mariupol being prepared for deportation to Russia.
The ongoing deportation of the Ukrainians to Russia presented in Russian propaganda outlets as evacuation includes passing the deportees through various checks in what the Russian authorities call the “filtration camps,” where the Russian special services interrogate and search people, collect their biometric data, copy the content of their mobile phones. Anyone suspected of having a pro-Ukrainian position gets “filtered out,” i.e. arrested and sent to a Russian detainment center.
“According to available information, about 5% don’t pass the filtration due to their pro-Ukrainian position and disappear,” Mr. Andryushchenko reported earlier.
On 12 April, Ukrainian Deputy PM Iryna Vereshchuk said that Russia holds a total of approximately 1,700 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in the prisons of Russia proper and the occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region. About 500 of those captives are women.
Russia distributes its passports among forcibly deported Ukrainians – Ombudswoman
On 11 April, Ukrainian Ombudsperson Lyudmyla Denisova reported that since the beginning of the all-out war, Russia deported more than 700,000 Ukrainians, of whom more than 131,000 were children. She referred to a Russian media outlet citing the official data, which also mentioned that 134,000 Mariupol residents were among those deported.
Often, the deported are denied opportunities to return to Ukraine or escape from Russia to the safety of the EU countries.
In late March, Mayor of Mariupol Vadym Boychenko reported that according to preliminary estimates, 5,000 people died in Mariupol during the month of the siege, of which about 210 were children. However, it has been impossible to count all the victims became many of them remain buried under the rubble.
The Ukrainian military reported that 13 Russian mobile crematoria were spotted in Mariupol to clean the streets of the bodies of dead civilians to hide evidence of the Russian crimes in the city.
According to the Mariupol City Council, more than 90% of the city’s infrastructure has been destroyed and at least 40% of that is beyond repair.
“There is the territory of Mariupol, but there is no city – [Russians] destroyed everything… The city is not there, it is the territory of the city. And it is soaked in blood,” Head of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko said in one of his latest interviews.
Read also:
- Russian chemical attack suspected on besieged Mariupol yet Russia’s blockade leaves no room for confirmation
- How the West enabled genocide in Mariupol with its misguided Azov obsession
- “I’m sure I’ll die soon. It’s a matter of days” – resident of besieged Mariupol
- “They talked to us like we were criminals” – how Russian occupiers deported me from Mariupol
- Martyred city of Mariupol wiped out of existence by Russia’s incessant shelling
- I was inside when the Russians bombed Mariupol drama theater: survivor’s story
