Russia forcibly transports Ukrainian civilians to the territory under its control or inside the Russian Federation after inspection and collection of biometric data at filtration points. The international human rights organization Human Rights Watch announced this on September 1 in its report, calling the filtering system for civilians «punitive and offensive».
Human rights activists spoke with 117 Ukrainians from Mariupol and the Kharkiv region, 18 of whom were filtered in the self-proclaimed DPR from March 15 to May 6, after which they were forcibly taken to Russia. All of them initially tried to leave the regions of hostilities on evacuation buses, personal vehicles or on foot. At checkpoints, they were forced to undergo a filtering process that included body searches, biometric data collection, and interrogation about their political views. The report says that eight Ukrainians interrogated in the DPR managed to avoid being sent to Russia — after checking at the filtration points, they left for the regions controlled by Ukraine. Donetsk region told human rights activists that he was 666th on the waiting list. People stopped wherever they could: the brother of one of the women interviewed by human rights activists, according to her, spent the night with his family in the field.
“There was a tent city, and his wife and children — the oldest was three and the child had just turned one — slept in a tent with other women and children, and my brother slept in the car,” she said. — It was cold, and the windows of the cars were smashed out due to the shelling. His children caught the stomach flu; they were vomiting and had persistent diarrhea, so the family was allowed to skip the line. If it weren't for the children who got so sick, I don't know how many more days they would have spent there.»
Those who did not pass the filter — often due to political opinions, connections with law enforcement or administrative bodies — were arrested, and the fate of some of the detainees is still not known. One of the volunteers told HRW that those who did not pass the filtration in the DPR were sent, among other things, to the colony in Yelenovka, where on July 29 53 prisoners were killed by shelling. The Russian version of the attack on the colony is that Ukraine fired at the colony with the captured defenders of the Mariupol plant «Azovstal» from HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, as they began to testify. Experts interviewed by CNN said that the nature of the damage in the colony does not match this weapon.
Ukrainians who spoke with HRW named 15 settlements in Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine where they and their loved ones underwent the filtration process: Donetsk, Amvrosievka, Bezymyanny, Dokuchaevsk and others. Earlier, the American project Conflict Observatory, created by the US State Department to document war crimes by Russia after the start of the war in Ukraine, published a report that talked about more than 20 filtration camps used for interrogation and detention of Ukrainian citizens and prisoners of war.
In the footsteps of mass graves. American researchers claim that Russia has created more than 20 filtration points for Ukrainians in the DPR