Politico reports:

The United States has called on Russia to immediately stop its systematic “filtration” and forced deportation of millions of Ukrainians in territories under Moscow’s control and to allow outside observers access to camps through which they pass.

“The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Wednesday.

Blinken said Russian authorities have “ interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported 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.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that the number of Ukrainians taken to Russia could be as high as 2 million people. “No one will say the exact numbers now,” he said in a video address.

“All these deported people are deprived of communication, their documents are taken from them, they are intimidated and they try to disperse them to remote areas of Russia so that it is as difficult as possible for them to return home to the Motherland,” Zelenskyy added. [Continue reading…]