Where have the Ukrainian refugees evacuated by the Russians gone?
Since the end of March, Ukrainian officials and NGOs have been sounding the alarm as nearly half a million Ukrainians (including 120,000 children) have found refuge or been displaced in Russia, according to the High Commission of the United Nations for refugees.
Guest of BFMTV on Wednesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky was particularly worrying.
"Part of Mariupol's population was evacuated to territories controlled by the Russian Federation," he said.
Volodymyr Zelensky explains that Ukrainians "are in specialized camps on Russian territory" pic.twitter.com/IhSuA7Hl2h
— BFMTV (@BFMTV) April 20, 2022
“All the people who went to these territories have disappeared.
They are in special camps on Russian territory.”
While the UN has called for an independent investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine, what exactly do we know about these places?
Mysterious disappearances in Mariupol
"These camps that Zelensky talks about are part of a procedure for the illegal deportation of Ukrainian citizens to Russian territory," immediately told the Parisian Irina (first name has been changed), member of the Center for civil liberties, a Ukrainian NGO based in kyiv, which monitors respect for human rights and one of whose lines of work is precisely the documentation of war crimes.
The mayor of the besieged port city, now almost entirely under Russian control, warned on Tuesday of the disappearance of certain civilians, saying on the city's Telegram channel that Russian troops "were deporting residents to Russia".
For Irina, the procedure is well established: "They isolate the cities - they did it in Mariupol, Robijne, Volnovakha and other cities - they do not allow civilians to evacuate, depriving them of water, heating , electricity… and then begin the procedure of illegal deportation.
The population has no choice but to stay in the city and die or be transferred to Russian territory,” explains the young Ukrainian.
In the Western press, a number of residents of the city recounted their conversations with their relatives, taken away by Putin's troops.
“My nephew called me from someone else's phone.
I understood that he was under pressure (…) He told me that he was in Bezimenne and that his phone had been taken from him.
That he had been filtered and that now he would either be deported to Russia or, in the worst case, called up for military service in the People's Republic of Donetsk, ”says a resident, for example, interviewed by RFI journalists. .
The Bezimenne camp
This name of Bezimenne comes up in several testimonies collected by the Guardian, the BBC and the Washington Post and designates a locality, located about forty kilometers east of Mariupol, in separatist territory.
The American company Maxar, which had published satellite photos proving that the Boutcha massacre was not staged by Ukraine, provided images of the village.
We see there, in fact, a concentration of about thirty blue and white tents, with a capacity of 450 people, according to the Guardian.
Last month, @theipaper was the first newspaper to reveal the location of a Russian-controlled filter camp in Bezimenne, eastern Ukraine – the first point in the process of moving people beyond the border.https://t.co/kfGFLItyeD
— Jenny Anne (@jennyanne432) April 16, 2022
What's going on in this camp?
Irina has heard of Bezimenne, although no testimony from refugees who have passed through the camp has reached her ears.
The young woman would not be surprised at the existence of such a place.
“During the transfer, there is what is called
the screening procedure
, carried out in camps where the Russians engage in physical and psychological violence,” she says.
“People have to answer questions about the Ukrainian army, what they think of Russia, they are asked to show their mobile phone,” she lists.
"We lose track of those who don't pass this stage."
The British newspaper The Guardian collected the testimony of a resident of Mariupol passed by this camp.
She actually claims to have been interrogated there by men presented as FSB agents (the Russian secret services, editor’s note).
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: what would change the capture of Mariupol by the Russians
According to our British colleagues, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, in the pay of the Russian authorities, indicated that approximately 5,000 Ukrainians had been interrogated in this way in Bezimenne with the aim of preventing "Ukrainian nationalists disguised as refugees from infiltrate Russia.
What happens to them afterwards?
Because after the interrogation, the refugees are taken to the border, again according to this anonymous source who testifies in the Guardian.
This is how she and her group found themselves in Rostov, a Russian city located 130 km east of the Ukrainian border.
Once there, they were told that their final destination would ultimately be Vladimir, another town 160 km from Moscow.
She then separated from the group claiming that she had family in Rostov, joined Moscow, then Saint Petersburg and crossed the border on foot towards "a European country".
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: why the evacuation of the inhabitants of Mariupol is so complicated
Irina remained in contact with Ukrainians now in the territory of the invader.
“They are in the region of Tatarstan (a republic of the Russian Federation, located 1,200 km east of Moscow), in Rostov, Tambov or Voronezh (two cities south of Moscow) but also in Sakhalin ( a lost island in the Russian Far East)", delivers the young woman.
Sparsely populated and economically depressed areas of the country.
In Russia, she says that the living conditions of refugees are very different depending on the region.
"In Penza (a city of 500,000 inhabitants 650 km south-east of Moscow) information has leaked suggesting that people were placed in some kind of concentration camps run by Russian volunteers," she says.
This information is nevertheless difficult to verify due to the absence of NGOs and journalists on site.
Have such camps ever been used by the Russians?
This term "filtration camps", also used by Ukrainian officials and the feminist activist who has taken refuge in France Inna Shevchenko, is not new and refers to dark episodes in contemporary Russian history.
The Russian army forcibly relocated 500,000 Ukrainians to Russia, including 121,000 children.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians are detained in “filtration camps”
— inna shevchenko (@femeninna) April 20, 2022
According to Anne Le Huérou, lecturer in Russian Studies at the University of Paris-Nanterre, the term appears for the first time after the Second World War.
“The Soviets interrogated Russian prisoners returning from Germany in these types of camps,” she notes.
We find it in 1994, during the first war in Chechnya between Russia and its rebellious province.
At that time, thousands of Chechen fighters and civilians reportedly disappeared or became disabled after passing through one of these camps, according to an article in Le Monde published in February 2000. "These were camps set up directly in Chechnya or in nearby Russian military bases,” explains the specialist in post-Soviet conflicts.
“The detainees, mainly men suspected of being combatants, were interrogated and tortured there.
We undressed them and looked to see if they had a mark on their right shoulder, which is found in those who handle a gun”.
Russia speaks of "evacuations"
For the time being, it is difficult to know whether war crimes are perpetrated inside the filtration camps located in Ukraine, such as that of Bezimenne.
Nor what happens to the refugees after their transfer.
Several Ukrainian officials claim that their passports are suppressed and they are prohibited from leaving the country.
A practice that would constitute one more war crime attributable to the Kremlin.
Faced with the accusations of deportations, Russia denies as a whole, preferring to evoke "evacuations".
"We are not talking, in any way, of people who left under duress or kidnapped, as our Western partners describe it, but of voluntary decisions", tempered on April 5 Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian representative to the Security Council of the 'UN.