Accounts of thousands of residents of Ukraine’s besieged port city of Mariupol being forcibly deported to Russia are “disturbing” and “unconscionable” if true, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said on Sunday.
Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Thomas-Greenfield said the US had not confirmed the allegations made on Saturday by the Mariupol city council via its Telegram channel.
“I’ve only heard it. I can’t confirm it, but I can say it is disturbing,” she said. “It is unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.”
Photo: REUTERS
Separately, a group of children stuck in a clinic in Ukraine’s besieged Mariupol for weeks have been taken to Russian-controlled territory, a carer and a relative of the clinic’s worker said on Sunday.
The 19 children, aged from four to 17 and mostly orphans, have been living in freezing cellars, hiding from shelling in harrowing conditions.
From nearby towns in the Donetsk region, they were sent to a Mariupol sanatorium that specializes in pulmonary conditions before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine.
Their carers have been unable to get to them since due to heavy fighting in the strategic port city that has been destroyed by Russian forces. The foster carer of six of the children, Olga Lopatkina, has been calling for their evacuation and wants to take them west and out of the country.
However, her oldest son, 17, called her on Sunday to say they had been taken to Donetsk, Ukraine’s separatist capital now under Russian control, where they were in a hospital, she said.
“I don’t know how to get them now,” she said, adding that the call was quick and no adult had informed her to tell her about the children’s whereabouts.
Alexei Voloshchuk, a relative of one of the sanatorium workers who took refuge with the children before escaping Mariupol, said that Russian forces turned them away from an evacuation to Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia.
He said the clinic informed him that a local lawmaker arrived to take the children in an ambulance to Zaporizhzhia via an officially agreed humanitarian corridor.
However, at a checkpoint in Berdyansk, Russian forces said that the children were from the Donetsk region and turned them around to the rebel capital.
Most of the children are from foster care homes in Ukraine’s Donetsk region that did not fall into the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.
Concerns have grown for their fate, with the Geneva-based Stop TB charity saying that it was “desperate” to evacuate them from fighting zones.
Additional reporting AFP
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