For several weeks, the Ukrainian president has denounced the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia via filtration camps. Human rights organizations are trying to investigate the subject, but few people who have passed through his famous camps are still free to testify.
With our special correspondents in Odessa, Aabla Jounaidi and Oriane Verdier
In this small cafe next to the Odessa train station, the stories of life under Russian authority mingle. Among them, that of Maria who has just fled Kherson.
“ The Russian occupiers announced that they will close the Kherson region from May 1 to May 10 to hold a fake referendum, create an independence day and connect us to Russia, she says. We were afraid that they would then deport us to Russia. They will force us to get on a bus and we will go to Siberia, the Russian Far East or Sakhalin “.
The mayor of Mariupol who denounced the deportation of the inhabitants of his city was among the first to issue the alert. This is what happened to Lara’s nephew, herself displaced from Mariupol.
” My nephew called me from someone else’s phone. I understood that he was under pressure because we had agreed on a code. So I asked the questions very carefully and we only had a few minutes, she details. He told me he was in Benzimene and that his phone had been taken from him. That he had been filtered and now he would either be deported to Russia or, in the worst case, called up for military service in the Donetsk People’s Republic »
Several similar testimonies have appeared in recent days in the media. All passed through this camp located in the self-proclaimed Republic of Donetsk under Russian authority. Women and children would then be sent to sparsely populated areas of Russia. For its part, Moscow recognizes that nearly 500,000 Ukrainian “refugees” are said to be in Russia today.
