Russia has started deportations

One of the grave crimes of the Russian occupiers in Ukraine is the deportation of civilians

And while there are mass killings of Ukrainians and the destruction of Ukrainian places on screens and in newspapers around the world, much less is said about deportations.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been forcibly deported from Ukraine within weeks of the war. And this process gained momentum.

Putin's Russia is returning to the criminal practice of the communist regime, when deportations were one of the main weapons of mass repression.

During the so-called collectivization of the 1930s, two million people were deported to the eastern and northern regions of the USSR. In Ukraine alone, between 1930 and 1931, 64,000 wealthy families were deported from the countryside. In the period from 1939 to 1941, when the Soviet Union occupied western Ukraine and Belarus during World War II, deportations became even more massive.

Every tenth inhabitant of these territories - 1,250,000 Ukrainians, Belarusians and Poles - was deported from their homeland.

A new wave of mass deportations awaited Ukrainians in the mid-1940s and early 1950s. At that time, about 180,000 Ukrainians were deported to remote areas of the USSR, only on charges of being connected with the OUN and UPA. More than 700,000 Ukrainians were forcibly relocated by the communist regimes of the USSR and Poland.

Entire peoples of the North Caucasus and the surrounding steppes - Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays - were forcibly deported far from their homeland.

The deportation of the autochthonous people of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea to Central Asia in May 1944 was a real genocide.

As in other similar cases, the place of the indigenous people of Crimea was inhabited en masse by the Russian population.

With these methods, the Kremlin regime created the myth of "originally Russian Crimea", artificially changing the demographics of the peninsula, which failed to recover even after the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland. And after the occupation in 2014, hundreds of thousands of Russians settled in Crimea and Sevastopol.

In place of the deported Latvians and Estonians, Armenians and Greeks, Germans and Bulgarians, Russians and Russified representatives of other nationalities settled en masse.

The Russians deliberately inhabited regions of Ukraine that had been depopulated by the Holodomor, deportations, and wars, especially in the south and east.

It was part of the policy of criminal colonization. We have before us the policy of genocide, to which the Russian occupiers are returning.

The full-scale war lasted only a month, during which the Russians occupied 15 percent of Ukrainian territory. The occupying power has not been established yet, fights are being fought.

But tens of thousands of people from the occupied territories of Azov, Donbas, Slobozhanshchina and Sivershchina have already been forcibly deported to Russia.

And the Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Belarus from the occupied districts of the Kiev region.

A particularly cynical crime is the deportation to Russia of thousands of Ukrainian children who were in boarding schools or orphanages or found themselves apart from their parents in the hands of the occupiers.

More than 30,000 people have been forcibly deported to Russia from Mariupol alone, whose residents are not allowed to go to other parts of Ukraine.

According to Putin's plan, our country should become Russian or uninhabited. Ukrainians must die, become refugees or be deported. And those who are not killed or expelled from the homeland must become slaves who unconditionally obey the occupiers.

But we will not allow that! This war is a war not only for freedom, but also for the very existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians.