Article by Sandy Fitzgerald in NewsMax
Ukrainian Official: Russia Putting Ukrainians Into Camps, Like 'Nazi Germany'
Ukrainians from the country's besieged cities are being taken to Russian territory and put into camps where they are "filtered there, as in Nazi Germany" Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk said in a televised interview Saturday.
"They are sorted into trustworthy and unreliable, their documents are taken away, they are checked for tattoos," Vereshchuk told the Current Time television channel. "And if God forbid, a person has something in the form of a trident or our coat of arms, the person disappears, and they can’t find him anymore. Children are taken away from their parents, children from orphanages or boarding schools are also taken away in an unknown direction."
She noted that on Saturday, humanitarian channels were successful, and that "4,000 people today will have warm food and the love of Ukrainians" after being evacuated from Mariupol.
However, they had to walk out, as the Russian military would not allow buses to enter the city, Vereshchuk said, adding that there have been cases when the Russians have shelled humanitarian convoys in Ukraine, or otherwise delayed them from moving forward.
Meanwhile, the Russian military is "forcibly" taking people toward the city of Novoazovsk, which is in a territory that Ukraine hasn't controlled since 2014, she confirmed.
"We have written all kinds of letters, we are signaling to the international community that this is illegal, that we did not open a corridor there, it is not safe," Vereshchuk said. "All the filtration camps that are now established are subject to the Geneva Conventions, and the people who are now issuing such orders will respond, but now what is happening is happening."
Ukraine's authorities are doing everything possible, including demanding from the Red Cross that if it opens a representative office in Rostov that it must make sure people are coming to their homeland in Ukraine and not being taken away in an "unknown direction," she added.
The filtration camps are "sheer lawlessness," that will "definitely lead to criminal consequences," Vereshchuk continued. "I also know about such a filtration camp in Donbas, these are Donetsk and Lugansk."
The Russian Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, claimed Saturday that it has information on more than 2.7 million Ukrainians who want to come to Russia. according to an Interfax report, with the Ministry of Defense saying that since February 24, almost 440,000 residents, including more than 91,000 children, have been evacuated to Russia.
Vereshchuk said Ukrainians have "lived peacefully" and did not "wish such a fate" for themselves or their children.
"Trust me, everything will be fine," she said. "The main thing now is to get people, find them and return them back to their homeland."
Vereshchuk added that the information about the filtration camps is coming from "those who left Mariupol, those who saw how children, women, and old people were taken away before their eyes."
As for the numbers, "what we know officially is about 40,000 people who were forcibly deported to Russia and their fate is still unknown," she said.
There are also people being forcibly taken to Russia and to the Donbas territories, from the suburbs of Kyiv, said Vereshchuk, but they are first being taken to Belarus, from where "they are trying to take them out to Russia."
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russia-ukraine-camps-iryna-vereshchuk/2022/03/27/id/1063071/
