Ukrainian Residents of Occupied Regions Targeted for Forced Moves to Siberia
The Kremlin is preparing a mass resettlement of Ukrainians from temporarily occupied territories to Siberia under the guise of the “Siberia Development Program.”
The Gaze reports on it, referring to the Center for National Resistance.
According to the official version, the program promises investments and the creation of industrial clusters. But experts see it as demographic redrawing and preparation for the deportation of residents of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions.
The Kremlin plans to attract Ukrainians to develop the devastated regions of Siberia and the Far East, as its own citizens are leaving these territories en masse.
In the occupied territories, directives have already been sent to administrations, schools, hospitals, and utilities requiring them to compile lists of employees who are “unencumbered by family circumstances,” i.e., those most vulnerable to long-term assignments in the East.
This mechanism replicates Soviet practices of organized deportations and is the first step towards the actual resettlement of Ukrainians under the guise of state programs.
“The “Sibirization” program is not an investment project, but an instrument of soft assimilation and an attempt to tear Ukrainians away from their homes in order to dissolve them in the vastness of the imperial experiment,” the statement reads.
The history of Soviet policy shows that forced resettlement of the population was a systematic practice of the Russian authorities. Various peoples, including the Crimean Tatars, were subjected to deportations under the pretext of “state security” or economic development of territories.
The Crimean Tatars are the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula, of Turkic origin, who have lived on the peninsula for centuries, preserving their own language and traditions. They have survived three Russian occupations of their homeland.
The greatest tragedy occurred on May 18, 1944, when the Soviet authorities began deporting Crimean Tatars to remote regions of Central Asia and Siberia. According to official data, more than 191,000 people were deported, while the National Movement of Crimean Tatars estimates the number to be over 423,000. In the first years after the deportation, between a third and a half of the population died.
The reason for the deportation was absurd accusations of alleged treason and collaboration with the Nazis. The process was carried out on the orders of Stalin and high-ranking officials of the USSR, starting with the gathering of people into trains at dawn and sending them off with almost no food or clothing.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in a move widely condemned as illegal under international law, seizing control of the peninsula and its government. This led to the forced imposition of Russian citizenship on residents and significant demographic and political changes. According to Vitalii Sekretar, first deputy head of the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, the Russian occupation authorities have forcibly deported at least 12,000 civilians from Crimea.
As The Gaze previously informed, the Dutch House of Representatives has officially recognized the Soviet-orchestrated deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 as an act of genocide.
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