In its October 15 assessment of the Russian offensive campaign, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reports that Russia continues to carry out massive forced deportations of Ukrainians “that likely amount to a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign in addition to apparent violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
On 14 October, Russian Deputy PM Marat Khusnullin stated that “several thousand” Ukrainian children from occupied Kherson Oblast are “already in other regions of Russia, resting in rest homes and children’s camps.”
Previously ISW reported that “Russian authorities openly admitted to placing children from occupied areas of Ukraine up for adoption with Russian families in a manner that may constitute a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
ISW says that Russian authorities may also be engaged in a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing by “depopulating Ukrainian territory through deportations and repopulating Ukrainian cities with imported Russian citizens.”
Read also:
- Russia corners Ukrainians in filtration and deportation
- Russian troops deport 5100 Ukrainian children to Russia (Jul 2022)
- Ukraine launches portal to find children deported to Russia
- Russian passports distributed among Ukrainian deportees
- How Russian occupiers deported me from Mariupol
- 1.5 mn deported Ukrainians can’t return home from Russia (Sep 2022)
- Russia holds in “filtration camps” 27,000 Mariupol residents (Apr 2022)
- Stalin deported 100,000 Ukrainians to Siberia and Kazakhstan in October 1947