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Accounts of interrogations, strip-searches emerge from Russian ‘filtration' camps in Ukraine
In early April, Vitaly and his wife and one-year-old daughter were offered a safe passage out of Mariupol. The Russians were going to evacuate them and other civilians by bus to Nikolske, a small industrial town controlled by pro-Russian forces around 20 kilometres northwest of the besieged city. Once they arrived, the men were separated from the women, and sent toward a trailer where they were told they would be searched. Or "filtered", as the troops guarding them put it. "We took turns going into the trailer, where two soldiers checked everything: phones, tattoos, personal belongings," he told the independent Russian-language news website Meduza in a May 12 interview. When Vitaly entered the trailer, he saw two men stripped to their underwear — one of them with his hands behind his head facing the wall, and the other sitting in a corner on the floor. "As I understood it, they recognised [them as] participants of some anti-Russian rallies." Vitaly, who was also strip-searched, was luckier, but only after successfully managing to explain why he had an American eagle tattooed on his body, and why his mobile phone was so clean of any messenger apps. "I had to prove I had nothing to do with the [Ukrainian military]," he said. "In the end they let me go." ’Men are rounded up and sent for filtration’ Posted by: Besoeker 2022-06-17 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=636002 |