Deported into slavery
Ukrainian authorities have said Moscow’s forces bombed an art school in Mariupol where more than 400 people had taken shelter, amid further reports that civilians from the devastated southern city were being forcibly transported to Russia.
Days after Russian shells struck a theatre in the city also being used as a shelter, local authorities said Mariupol’s G12 art school had been destroyed while women, children and elderly people were inside. There was no immediate word on casualties.
A theater and an art school. Both full of non-combatants taking shelter. Meanwhile Russia is kidnapping Ukrainians.
As Moscow claimed on Sunday it had fired a hypersonic missile against Ukraine for the second time, the country’s human rights spokesperson, Ludmila Denisova, accused its forces of kidnapping Mariupol residents and taking them to Russia.
“In recent days, several thousand Mariupol residents have been deported to Russia,” Denisova said on Telegram. After processing at “filtration camps”, some were then transported to the Russian city of Taganrog, about 100km from Mariupol, and from there sent by rail “to various economically depressed cities in Russia”, she said.
Denisova said Ukrainian citizens had been “issued papers that require them to be in a certain city. They have no right to leave it for at least two years with the obligation to work at the specified place of work. The fate of others remains unknown.”
Russian news agencies have said hundreds of people Moscow calls refugees have been bussed from Mariupol to Russia.
Denisova said the “abductions and forced displacements” violated the Geneva conventions and the European convention on human rights and called on the international community to “respond … and increase sanctions against the terrorist state of the Russian Federation”.
Homo homini lupus.
Forced deportations are a classic part of the old Soviet playbook. In the past, they tended to deport persons they deemed to be subversive, which was anyone in any kind of position of authority. I don’t know how well that translates to the alleged abductees in this story, but given that the Russians seem to be indiscriminately targeting civilians, it’s not a stretch to imagine that they consider any civilian still in the area to be subversive (and by logical extension any civilian at all, because if you fled the Russian “liberation” you would be suspect because who tries to flee being liberated, and if you stayed then perhaps you did so in order to fight. That’s the classic styling that my grandfather’s family described, after they fled before Soviet invaders in WWII).
It also reeks of the practice from the classical period of taking the women slaves, carrying them far from their home, and handing them out to men who were victorious in war. I shudder at what the deported women and children may have to face.