Kyiv has already reported mass kidnappings to Russia. The US State Department is now issuing concrete figures, even citing sources from the Moscow government. The forced resettlements were therefore planned at an early stage.
The US has accused the Russian government of "deporting" up to 1.6 million Ukrainians to Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Moscow of "unlawfully relocating and deporting" vulnerable people and spoke of a "war crime" aimed at depopulating parts of Ukraine.
Blinken commented on alleged crimes in Ukraine ahead of a conference in The Hague, Netherlands. It will be attended by Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan and EU Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders.
The US Secretary of State referred, among other things, to sources from the Russian government, who pointed to the forced resettlement of 900,000 to 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens from their homeland to Russia. Some people were abducted to isolated areas in the far east of Russia. Around 260,000 children were among the deportees. Blinken explained that some of them were deliberately separated from their parents in order to be put up for adoption in Russia.
The forced resettlement was apparently planned early on and is similar to the Russian approach in other wars, such as in Chechnya. Blinken accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of "filtering" the population, which included separating families, confiscating Ukrainian passports and issuing Russian passports. It is "apparently" about "changing the population structure of parts of Ukraine," said Blinken. Russia must be "imperatively" held accountable for this.
On Monday, Putin published a decree giving all Ukrainians easier access to Russian citizenship. Speaking to journalists in Berlin today, the spokesman for the federal government, Steffen Hebestreit, called the measure "part of Russian propaganda". Ukraine is a sovereign, independent state. No other state could "offer any passports to the citizens of Ukraine."
At the end of May, the Russian President had already decided to fast-track naturalization for the two southern Ukrainian regions of Cherson and Zaporizhia, which are largely occupied by Russia. According to their own statements, the Russian occupation authorities there are already working on a referendum on union with Russia. In 2019, the simplified naturalization procedure was already introduced in the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which pro-Russian separatists had proclaimed in the areas in eastern Ukraine they had occupied since 2014.
