Russian stash houses of Ukraine prisoners discovered

 PJ Media:

INews, an independent news source in the UK, is reporting that a network of former Soviet sanatoriums and other sites in regions including Siberia, the Caucasus, the Arctic Circle, and the Far East, are housing Ukrainians forcibly removed from their homeland. Some of the camps are up to 5,500 miles from Ukraine.

Moscow had ordered towns and cities across Russia to prepare for the arrival of nearly 100,000 “refugees.” The Russian government now claims it has “evacuated” one million people from the war zone. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in April that 500,000 Ukrainians had been sent to Russia.

For our VIPs: Part II: Russia Is Fighting the Ukraine War on Five Fronts: Where Are They Winning?

It seems clear that there are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from areas occupied by the Russian army who aren’t in Ukraine anymore.

INews interviewed human rights activists who are helping Ukrainians escape the camps.

“When people are only given a choice to stay under increasingly heavy shelling or to enter the territory of an occupying power, it constitutes forced transfer under international humanitarian law.

“We are extremely concerned this is happening. People who seek evacuation to safer areas in Ukraine are shuttled off to Russia instead – in some cases to remote areas very far from Ukrainian or European borders.

“They are vulnerable, destitute, often without identification documents and find themselves at the mercy of the occupying power.”

The sites are known as Temporary Accommodation Points (TAP). The Russians call them fil’tratsiia, or filtration camps. They’re a holdover from World War II, when Stalin was terrified that returning Russian POWs were “infected” by liberal ideas. The camps were set up to “reeducate” the soldiers.

Putin’s motives are apparently far simpler. Russia has a labor shortage in these remote regions due to population decline. The Ukrainians have been put to work — sometimes in dangerous jobs.

...

This looks like a massive war crime that will be hard to ignore.  Russia must be ordered to repatriate these people back to their homes and those res[onsble for the forced labor operations must be held to account.