Deportation of Ukrainian citizens from the territory of active military operations or from the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus
On 24 February 2022, the Russian Federation launched a full-scale aggression against Ukraine. Already from early March 2022, information began to arrive about the forcible transfer of Ukrainian citizens to the territories that had been occupied before 24 February 2022, and later – about their deportation to the territory of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. People were taken from the areas of active military operations, as well as from the settlements of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson regions occupied by the Russian army.
Ukrainian citizens who found themselves in the territories occupied by the Russian army tried to leave (evacuate) on their own to the Ukrainian government-controlled territory but it was not always possible as the Russian military was blocking evacuation corridors and shelling the gray zone. These people were forced to leave through the occupied territories of Ukraine to RF and then to safe third countries, through which they returned to the Ukrainian government-controlled territory.
Since the beginning of the full-scale aggression against Ukraine, Ukraine 5 AM Coalition has been documenting the facts of international crimes committed by the forces of the aggressor state, including the deportation of Ukrainian citizens to the territory of RF. Therefore, the main task of this analytical report is to outline the deportation of Ukrainian citizens as a full-scale and systematic practice pursued by RF in the territories of Ukraine temporarily occupied by it and the accompanying measures of so called «filtration», as well as to summarise the maximum amount of information and facts regarding these events.
