In the Penza region of Russia a camp has been set up to keep more than 400 residents of Mariupol forcibly deported from Ukraine.
Lyudmila Denisova, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, announced this.
"Today I had a conversation with Russian Federation citizens who support Ukraine. They reported about a camp in the Penza region for forcibly deported from Ukraine Mariupol residents. It is a closed institution with several buildings, surrounded by a fence and guarded, with a checkpoint at the entrance. The freedom of movement of our citizens is limited as it’s forbidden to leave the camp, "she wrote on Facebook.
There are more than 400 Ukrainian citizens in the camp now, mostly women and 147 children of different ages, including infants. Another group of forcibly deported citizens, about 150 people, are expected in the next few days.
"Our citizens are in an extremely difficult and depressed state. They do not know their fate, when and in which region of the Russian Federation they will be taken. They are not provided with any information," the ombudsman announced.
Denisova also said that people have been living in the camp for several weeks. They do not have the necessary clothes, shoes, even underwear. In fact, they were taken from the basements in what they were - in winter clothes. They lack baby food and personal hygiene items. Women prepare food from what they are given.
Representatives of the russian Sberbank came to the camp to collect lists for card accounts, saying that they would transfer 10,000 rubles each, but this hasn’t happened.
Russian activists, who visited Mariupol residents, told Denisova about the situation. According to them, there are also foreign students from Turkmenistan in the camp who hid in the bomb shelter under a student dormitory in Mariupol, and then reached the temporarily occupied territory of Donetsk region on their own, from where they were forcibly deported to Russia. Unlike Ukrainians, they are allowed to leave the territory of the camp.
It is known now that there are three more similar camps in the Penza region, to which residents of the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (almost 90,000 people) were deported in February before the war.
The activists inform that Ukrainians are being forcibly relocated to various regions of the Russian Federation, including Khabarovsk.
"The forcible deportation and deprivation of our citizens of their fundamental rights to decent living conditions, freedom of movement and information is a gross violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War." Denisova stressed.
She appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross and called for immediate humanitarian assistance to citizens and to support their return to Ukraine as soon as possible.
Earlier Denisova reported that almost 40,000 residents of Mariupol were deported to Russia or to the occupied territory of Donbass. Counting deportees is complicated by the fact that Ukrainian documents are confiscated from people.
One of the forcibly deported residents of Mariupol is a 12-year-old orphan Kira Obedinska. She was deported to Donetsk together with people with whom she was in the shelter. Her father, Ukrainian water polo champion Yevhen Obedinskyy, died on March 17 during an airstrike in Mariupol, and Kira lost her mother as a baby. In addition to that, the occupiers forcibly deported the personnel and patients of maternity hospitals in Mariupol to the Russian Federation.