Russia plans to deport Ukrainians from occupied regions to Siberia
Photo: Vladimir Putin, President of Russia (Getty Images)
Russia is preparing to deport Ukrainian citizens living in temporarily occupied territories to Siberia, intending to use them to settle and develop the devastated region, according to the Center for National Resistance.
Recently, Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu announced a large-scale Program for the Development of Siberia, promising 700 billion in investment and the creation of "industrial clusters."
Notably, Moscow plans to rely not on its own citizens but on the population of occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions to develop Siberia, because Russians are not eager to go to these depressing regions. In this way, Russia aims to build a new "industrial empire" using Ukrainians' labor.
According to the Center, Moscow has already launched the first stage of this mechanism. Official letters have been sent to local administrations, schools, hospitals and utility companies requesting they "identify employees for possible long-term secondments to the Far East and the Angaro–Yenisei macro-region."
Managers are now required to submit lists of "employees without family obligations," who would be easiest to deport without causing public outcry.
The Center noted that this mechanism closely mirrors Soviet practices when Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians from Western Ukraine, Chechens, and other peoples were deported.
Thus, Russia is attempting to change the demographic makeup of the occupied territories fundamentally.
"The Siberization program is not an investment project but an instrument of soft assimilation and an attempt to separate Ukrainians from their homes in order to dissolve them in the expanses of an imperial experiment," the Center added.
Deportation of Ukrainians
Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia has been deporting Ukrainian children.
This was confirmed by cyber specialists from the Defense Intelligence, who hacked servers of the local authorities in Crimea and found information about the forced relocation of Ukrainian children.
Recently, Ukraine managed to bring back a group of children who had been taken to Russia in 2022. They were pupils of the Novopetrivska Special School in the Mykolaiv region.
