According to the British newspaper “Guardian”, a number of Ukrainian asylum seekers who entered Georgia revealed human suffering, “inhuman” living conditions and abuses of prisoners and detainees in “Russian dissolution camps”.
A Ukrainian asylum seeker living in Georgia named Olina said he spent three weeks in the cold and starving and lying on the ground in a Russian slaughterhouse.
Olina was being held in a camp in the Russian village of Nikolsk, which borders the Moscow-controlled Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Regarding the details of his interrogation, he said: “The Russian officer ordered me to take off my clothes for inspection, which he described as the worst insult he has suffered since escaping from Mariupol.”
And he spoke of a “terrible” moment, when a Russian officer accused him of being a “sniper” because of a bruise on his shoulder, to which he replied, “I am 60 years old, how can I be a sniper?” According to what he told the Guardian.
He explained that the Russian officer replied, “Anyway, I will not wear my glasses.”
Olina’s story was not the only one. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is estimated that 20,000 Ukrainians have entered Georgia, most of them through Russia.
Most of these refugees are from Russian-occupied areas such as Mariupol and Kherson, and faced a real dilemma, having to choose between staying in besieged cities or fleeing to the country that started the war against their country.
To enter Russia, the displaced are forced to undergo a process called “dissolution”, during which they are photographed, interrogated, fingerprinted and their phone contents checked, and this is done in the camp. Specials are done.
During the “dissolution”, men are asked to take off their underwear in search of “tattoos” that may indicate links to Ukrainian nationalist groups.
Speaking to the Guardian, Olina recalls how four Russian guards attacked a man because of “a key place with the image of the Ukrainian national emblem.”
He said they brutally beat him with a baton before throwing him out without a coat or hat in sub-zero temperatures.
According to the Guardian, Ukrainian refugees fleeing Mariupol are being transferred to the camps without their knowledge after Russian forces tell them to transfer them to Ukrainian-controlled cities.
The dissolution process ends in one of two ways: According to the Guardian, you will either be “passed” during the interrogation and handed a small piece of paper stamped with the engagement date and the signature of the supervising officer, or you will be “arrested”. .
Tamara, Ulna’s 65-year-old sister, recounts the conditions of detention inside the camp, noting that they “slept first on the floor and then on a cardboard box.”
“For the first few days, only one meal a day was served by a diner inside the camp, but the Russians later closed the diner and asked us to find our own food,” he said.
For her part, Zana says she and her family fled behind the refinery door after hearing a Russian officer talk about “transferring him, his wife and son to a Russian island near Japan.”
As for Maxim, he said that his wife, Yulia, was diabetic and suffering from insulin deficiency.
“We were waiting in the corridor and saw a man in a Ukrainian army uniform being interrogated,” he said, adding that he had told his wife about the situation to a Russian soldier. Is. “His knees are tied behind his back with his hands.”
Others say informing officers of specific plans was enough to get to a specific Russian city so they could make their way to Russia and then to Georgia.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the Ukraine war has created one of the largest human displacement crises in the world today.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at least 4.8 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered across Europe, including those who first went to neighboring countries and then moved.
But the total number of people who fled Ukraine is much higher, if more than 7.3 million people crossed the Ukrainian border and returned by June 7.
According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Ukrainians who have fled abroad are women and children, as men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forced to stay because they may be recruited to fight Russian forces.
According to AFP, the United Nations International Organization for Migration estimates that more than 8 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the war.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 1.1 million people have left Ukraine for Russia since February 24 and about 17,000 for Belarus, Moscow, and the number of those returning to Ukraine is unknown.
Source: Lebanon Debate
