Kremlin wanted to send Ukrainians to concentration camps in Siberia and force them to build cities – Danilov

Denys Karlovskyi — Thursday, 21 April 2022, 22:52

Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, says that the Russian top brass had plans to deport a large proportion of Ukrainians to concentration camps in western Siberia to be used as forced labour to build new cities for the Russians.

Source: Ukrainska Pravda interview with Danilov, to be published on Friday 22 April

Quote from Danilov: "On 6 September 2021, [Russian Defence Minister Sergei] Shoigu published an article entitled ‘New Cities of Siberia’. Few people paid any attention to this publication, but we pay attention to such things.

After reading it carefully, we realised that their desire to build up Siberia at the expense of our citizens and our country, as has already happened time and again, will never go away.

Shoigu explicitly announced this plan - to build three to five large cities with populations of between 300,000 and 1 million. And, consequently, this has to be [done by] Ukrainians.

All the reports that our partners’ intelligence was giving us were about concentration camps, filtration camps, and physically eliminating the [Ukrainian -ed.] president and top political leadership as the number one priority."

Details: Danilov believes that Shoigu hinted in the article that Ukrainians were to work as forced labour. The Russian minister wrote that citizens from the Commonwealth of Independent States should be brought in to do the work.

However, Danilov insists, other CIS countries did not have a sufficient number of physically able citizens to accomplish such an ambitious city-building scheme.

Background:

• In February 2022 some Western publications published intelligence reports from their sources stating that Russia was preparing filtration and labour camps for Ukrainians, to which dissenters would be deported after the occupying forces had invaded.
• After the invasion, the Russian occupiers set up filtration camps, particularly for deported Mariupol residents. Ukrainians are stripped of their citizenship, their phones and documents are confiscated, and they are sent deep into depressed areas of the Russian Federation.
• The Mariupol city authorities have information that at present, 30,000 of the city’s residents have been forced into Russian filtration camps.
• Danilov told reporters that the Ukrainian authorities were aware that Russia was planning a full-scale offensive, but that they were expecting it on 22 February, not the 24th. In November 2021, when the earliest intelligence reports began to appear in the media, the NSDC secretary referred to the information concerning a possible Russian attack on Ukraine as "disinformation".