Russian Orthodox Church facilitates forced deportation of Ukrainians to Russia – investigation

Kateryna Tyschenko — Sunday, 24 April 2022, 19:30

The Russian Orthodox Church is playing a key role in the forced deportation of Ukrainians to the Russian Federation by placing those brought into the country in churches, monasteries and convents.

Source: Slidstvo.Infо

Details: An investigation by journalists has revealed that the Russian Ministry of Emergencies is passing on information on deportees to the clergy, who then find placements for them in churches, monasteries and convents.

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ministry has been emailing reports on the occupied territories and deportations of Ukrainians to the Russian Orthodox Church’s Synodal Department for Charitable Work. The Ministry also provides the clergy with daily reports on the progress of military action in the occupied territories of Ukraine and on the numbers of Ukrainians being forcibly deported, the routes by which they are being transported, and their time of arrival in Russia.

The relevant emails from the Church’s charitable arm were forwarded to the journalists by hackers from Anonymous and DDoSecrets.

One of the documents published by Slidstvo.Info discusses "assistance to citizens of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and Ukraine on the territory of the Russian Federation (as of 6 am on 22 March 2022)". It reports on the total number of "arrivals" to five regions of Russia being "365,697 people, including 76,819 children". According to the document, 21,224 Ukrainian nationals, including 9,931 children, had been placed in 325 "temporary shelters"; the total number of such shelters throughout Russia’s 85 regions was 1,202, with a total capacity of 99,254 people, of which 79% was still available.

The emails were sent to/from the email address mchs@diaconia.ru, which was probably set up to maintain contact with the Russian law enforcement and emergency services with regard to the war in Ukraine. The first test email was sent to this address on 21 February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The sender of the test email, Polina Yufereva from the Russian Orthodox Church, is the coordinator of Church aid in emergencies.

The latest email obtained by the journalists (dated 30 March) indicates that close to 490,000 Ukrainians had arrived in Russia, including 100,000 children. The same number of forcibly deported Ukrainians was stated by the Ukrainian Ombudsperson Ludmyla Denysova around the same time.

A resident of Rubizhne, which is on the contact line in the Donbas region, told Slidstvo.Info about her five-day journey through Russia to Estonia and the series of interrogations that she was subjected to while in Russia. According to her, conversations with the Russian emergency services were particularly unpleasant because they would trash Ukraine and its leadership.

"Those Ukrainians who were unable to escape from Russia after forced deportation (and they constitute the overwhelming majority), after the ‘filtration’ discussions, which are essentially interrogations, with Russian emergency service staff, end up in the second round of filtration – ‘the spiritual one’. Law enforcement authorities that have been fruitfully cooperating with the Russian clergy for a long time, hand these Ukrainians over to monasteries and churches", writes Slidstvo.Info.

From the email exchanges obtained via the Anonymous and DDoSecrets groups, as well as from open sources, journalists have learned that virtually every region of Russia to which Ukrainians are transported has an eparchy [diocese] that is responsible for the deportees. They bring them food and conduct "spiritual conversations".

According to the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate, 52 eparchies of the Russian Orthodox Church are "assisting" deported Ukrainians. Slidstvo.Info has compiled a map of their location, which shows that the majority of Church "shelters" are in Rostov Oblast. 

Some eparchies provided monastery and convent premises and shelters for the deported Ukrainians. However, it is not clear how the latter end up in those "shelters", as the Church does not publicise the availability of its facilities for refugees. Clergy have only been reporting on the number of Ukrainians who have already "moved in".

Among the correspondence, journalists found one email (shown below) discussing the need to install surveillance cameras at the shelters. The clergy explained that this was due to security concerns.

The Church does not advertise information on how Ukrainians can get to its "shelters" or on the conditions in which they are kept, still less the fact that there are cameras for surveillance of the forced deportees.