Refugees, as well as Ukrainians forcibly transferred to Russia from Russian-occupied areas, are being pressured to declare Ukrainian military personnel guilty of war crimes, Human Rights Watch (HRW) Eastern Europe specialist Tatyana Loskjina said. “In the temporary shelters where they are housed, they are visited by detectives from the Russian Public Prosecution Service who ask them whether they have witnessed war crimes by the Ukrainian army or were themselves victims of them.”
Lokshina: ‘A 24-year-old woman told me that she was pressured to sign such a statement, but she refused. According to her, other people, especially the elderly, did sign. Without actually knowing where they had put their signature. They were just too scared.’
This is also reported by KHPG, a human rights group from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. According to Russian lawyers and volunteers, refugees are sometimes sawed through for hours, until they finally sign the statement without reading it, to get rid of the intimidating interrogations. In Saint Petersburg, Ukrainians from the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were encouraged to report to the judiciary for ‘victim’ status and to participate in an investigation into Ukrainian war crimes.
One of the refugees was questioned about the Drama Theater in Mariupol, where hundreds of people were killed in a Russian bombing raid on March 16. It was clear from the questioning that the interrogators only wanted to talk about an “explosion” that the Ukrainian Azov battalion would be blamed for.
Deportations
The Russian authorities are believed to be collecting statements for the trials they are preparing against imprisoned Ukrainian soldiers. Among them are the men of the Azov battalion, who had to surrender after months of fighting when the Azovstal steel mill, their last stronghold in Mariupol, fell.
Human Rights Watch has criticized not only the controversial interrogations but also the forcible transfer of people from Russian-occupied territories. There are currently about one million evacuated Ukrainians in Russia. Moscow claims that they chose Russia of their own free will, but according to HRW, a large part of them were brought into the occupying territory against their will, according to HRW. “Often people were chased into the buses without being given a choice of where to be evacuated.”
That amounts to a war crime, Lokshina emphasizes, even though no violence was used. Under international humanitarian law, it is prohibited to transfer residents of occupied territories against their will to the territory of the occupying forces. HRW demands that Russia immediately end those deportations.
Filtration Centers
So far, the international human rights organization has found no evidence that evacuated or deported Ukrainians are being systematically mistreated or tortured in the “filtration centers” to which the Russians take them. There, their phones are turned inside out and they are checked for nationalist tattoos or marks on their shoulders that indicate they were carrying weapons.
During the war in Chechnya, those ‘filters’ were known as torture centers where detainees were not sure of their lives. That doesn’t seem to be the case now, Lokshina says, but she acknowledges that it is difficult to get reliable information from refugees who are still in Russia. “Often they are afraid that they will be bugged.” Lokshina does know of three cases where men have disappeared, without their families knowing where they have gone.
Hundreds of civilians from Mariupol have also been detained for weeks in filtration centers in Bezimenne and Kazatskiy in violation of international humanitarian law, although they had been checked for a long time. Two refugees who had captured images of the filthy, overcrowded centers have been arrested and are now in prison in the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (DNR) for ‘spreading fake news’.
far corners
What is the fate of the people who are not by the filter come, for example because they served in the Ukrainian army, is unclear. They are transferred to detention centers of the Russian secret service FSB where they are interrogated about military operations and the armament of the Ukrainians. Given the practices that take place in ordinary Russian detention centers, it is difficult to imagine that they are treated according to the rules.
Refugees who have received a filter paper are sent to temporary reception centers, often not too far from the Ukrainian border, such as in Rostov or Voronezh. But some Ukrainians are sent to far corners of Russia, as far as Vladisvostok.
According to Lokshina, Russia will in principle not stop Ukrainian refugees who want to leave the country. But many of them have no money and the necessary papers to cross the border. Only those who are well-funded or who are lucky enough to receive help from Russian volunteers have a chance to leave the involuntary place of exile.