The case for genocide in Ukraine
Component: Filtration camps.
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
On a warm but crisp day at the end of June, I sipped coffee in a smelly fish restaurant. Another time, I sat on a teal velvet bench in a shiny bistro. Still another, I took notes in a relatively bland NGO office. In each instance, I was in Kyiv, speaking to a different Ukrainian war crimes investigator — each of whom said that they believe Russia is perpetrating genocide in their country. I’ve spent months since then learning more and more about the components that make up this crime, how evidence is being gathered in this conflict and how investigators and prosecutors see a potential path to justice.
The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court in The Hague, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” which include:
A. Killing members of the group;
B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
C. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Another element is what the United Nations classifies as “mental” (let’s call this F): the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
[I’ve coded below with the above letters where such actions are taking place. Caveat: I have not discussed these with lawyers. I’m giving you what I know and think as a journalist who covers Ukraine and war crimes in general.]
While I’ve written about the probability that Russians are committing rape as a war crime, and, possibly, as an element of genocide; the targeted shooting of civilians fleeing the war; the beating and terrorization of Ukrainians; the deliberate destruction of churches and cultural monuments; and more, what I want to tell you about here is yet another horror that falls under the umbrella crime of genocide.
Hundreds of thousands of adults and children have been “disappeared” after being forced through more than what some experts estimate to be about 20 “filtration camps” where Ukrainians are kept in terrible conditions, often deprived of food and water. The U.S. State Department wrote in July that various sources “including the Russian government, indicate that Russian authorities have interrogated, detained and forcibly deported [C/F] between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, from their homes to Russia — often to isolated regions in the Far East. Moscow’s actions appear premeditated and draw immediate historical comparisons to Russian ‘filtration’ operations in Chechnya and other areas.”
State called this an “apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine.” [F]
Tetiana Pechonchyk, a human rights investigator with a Ukrainian group called Zmina, first told me about the kidnapping of children and adults when we met in Kyiv at the fish restaurant. But she was unable to give a clear estimate of how many people have been spirited away for two reasons:
For one thing, investigators do not have access to the occupied Ukrainian territories in the east — the area is an information black hole. The other is that not all the people who have ended up in Russia were forced there — although, you could argue they were forced in a different way, out of necessity rather than abduction.
“The most common situation,” Pechonchyk said, “is when people are not left any other options to escape with their life.” These people have fled to Russia because the Russians have not allowed for safe green corridors that would allow them to exit the country another way. “So this is the only way for them to flee,” she said.
Pechonchyk added that some Ukrainians who felt aligned with Russia have gone voluntarily, but that she believes the vast majority have been forcibly deported and sent through filtration camps.
In these camps, she said, the Russians try to figure out whether people are loyal to the invading Russians. “And if they find some sense that might, to their mind, for example, give proof that these people were connected to the military, then these people are also taken and kept incommunicado. Also, from what we know, [there is] a huge, vast practice of torture [B] applied to such detainees, including many cases when people were tortured to death.” [B/C]
Civilians are searched, sometimes forcibly undressed and interrogated “about personal background, family ties, political views and allegiances,” according to the United Nations, which also said that these are prisons where “women and girls are at risk of sexual abuse.” Anyone holding pro-Ukrainian or anti-Russian views — or even wearing a tattoo of a Ukrainian flag or a military insignia — may be indefinitely detained, tortured, beaten or disappeared, in a nightmarish echo of the Holocaust.
One former prisoner, Stas Hlushko, 37, told The New York Times in July how new inmates at the camp he was in were beaten on arrival:
“As prison guards explained to us, it’s important for the prisoner to be humiliated at once,” he said. “The torture of us civilians was not so bad as for soldiers.” The Times reports that he described “how camp guards would create a ‘corridor’ and force new prisoners to run the gantlet as he was beaten with ‘chains, metal pipes and so on.’”
“One emergency service guy was put in our cell and for a day couldn’t move,” Hlushko said. “He was tortured with electricity.”
Men like Vitaly Sytnikov, a taxi driver, have disappeared into the filtration camps and whatever came next, not to be heard from for months, or never again. Sytnikov was transporting refugees between Zaporizhzhia and Nikolskyi — about a four-hour drive — when he was stopped at a checkpoint and detained by Russian forces on March 28, according to testimony taken by the 5 a.m. Coalition, a consortium of more than a dozen Ukrainian NGOs, including Zmina. (The Russians invaded on Feb. 24, at 5 a.m., and Ukrainians I’ve met tend to begin their stories at that moment.)
Sytnikov’s mother, Svitlana, said that she had learned through volunteers that her son had been taken to a Donetsk filtration camp, and then to Olenivka, in the occupied Donetsk Oblast, eventually winding up in a place called Penal Colony 120. At the end of July, explosions at the colony killed more than 50 prisoners of war [A], and wounded dozens more. Many experts believe Russia intentionally set off these bombs to cover traces of what they’d inflicted on the POWs.
The disappearances have specific goals, Pechonchyk told me. “The first goal is very practical: It is to get rid of population in the cities that are almost destroyed, like Mariupol.” She pointed out that it is going to be extremely difficult to restore the infrastructure of such decimated places. “When you get rid of the population, you also get rid of those who might protest or be [disloyal]. So, it’s to simplify the managing of the occupied areas.”
The second goal, she said (as have other experts I’ve spoken to), is more ideological. It is meant to “erase [the] Ukrainian national identity, and to mix the population.” [F]
When we spoke at the end of June, she said the Russian government had already announced that the children taken from Ukraine did not know Russian “at a sufficient level.” That they plan to make them “Russian Russians.” [E/F]
On Tuesday, the Washington Post’s editorial board wrote about what Ukraine estimates to be as many as 11,000 children forcibly taken to Russia without their parents.
“President Vladimir Putin issued a decree in May making it easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children, and the policy is being ‘vigorously pursued’ by the Russian children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, who ‘openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities and teaching them to love Russia,’” the Post reported.
Make no mistake, this mass kidnapping is something the Russian government is proud of.
“Ukrainian children taken to Russia would, at first, insult the Russian leader by singing the Ukrainian national anthem,” Lvova-Belova said, “but then it transforms into love for Russia.”
So-called “love for Russia.”
And the Russian propaganda machine churns on. But so do the many excellent human rights investigators who are gathering what is needed to build a strong case for genocide, and, as the world has seen so far, the Ukrainians are not to be underestimated — neither on the battlefield nor in their comprehensive, damning investigations.
Click here to read how Putin could be held criminally responsible for war crimes.
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Am in shock, so cannot comment. Thank you for writing this.
I listen to the BBC podcast called Ukrainecast, which often has me close to tears. Thanks for sharing this. It is difficult to know what to do other than make donations, and to be aware of what is happening.