Polish PM accuses Russia of building concentration camps in Ukraine

Russian forces have been constructing concentration camps in occupied Ukraine according to the Prime Minister of Poland. 

Mateusz Morawiecki accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of constructing "camps" in Ukraine similar to those built in Poland 75 years ago by Nazi Germany. 

"On the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Morawiecki wrote on his official state Facebook page, “let us remember that to the east Putin is building new camps."

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian forces have been using a variety of camps to hold, and then filter, Ukrainian citizens that fell under their control. 

“Ukrainian citizens are being taken to filtration camps in a concerted effort to suppress their resistance,” according to a U.S. State Department report on the issue. 

“Many Ukrainian citizens are facing forced deportations, arbitrary detentions, and torture and other abuses,” the report continued. 

While at Russia’s filtration camps, Ukrainian citizens have been subjected to strip searches and have had any nationalistic tattoos photographed and logged. 

Ukrainians detained in Russia’s filtration camps were also forced to have their fingerprints taken, a situation eerily familiar to what many Jews faced under Nazi Germany. 

“Ukrainian citizens have had their passports confiscated and their cell phones searched,” the US State Department report added, “with Russia’s forces sometimes downloading their contact lists.”

In a July 2022 statement from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, America’s chief diplomat called on Russia to end its “systematic filtration and forced deportations” in the Ukranian territory’s it controlled. 

Blinken also estimated that roughly 900,000 to 1,600,000 Ukrainian citizens had been deported to Russia, including 260,000 children. 

“Evidence is mounting that Russian authorities are also reportedly detaining or disappearing thousands of Ukrainian civilians who do not pass ‘filtration’,” Blinken continued.

“There are reports that some individuals targeted for ‘filtration’ have been summarily executed,” Blinken added, “consistent with evidence of Russian atrocities committed in Bucha, Mariupol, and other locations in Ukraine.”

While all of this may sound worrying, it pales in comparison to what Russia has planned for the Ukrainians living in the four territories Vladimir Putin illegally annexed from Ukraine last year. 

On January 24th, while the world was worried about ensuring timely tank deliveries to Ukraine, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin signed an order to set up 24 new penal colonies across Doentsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia. 

“The decree from the Russian government,” wrote Newsweek reporter Isabel Van Brugen, “shows that 12 penal colonies will be set up in the Donetsk region.”

Van Burgen added that “a further seven in the Luhansk region, three in the Russian-controlled part of the Kherson region, and an additional two facilities will be built in Zaporizhzhia, where a ‘settlement-type colony’ will also be established.”

While Russia may claim these new facilities will be penal colonies, it is quite clear they will be something wholly more sinister. Though the world once said never again, it appears as if we will see the mistakes of the twentieth century repeated in the twenty-first century.