Russian filtration camps for Ukrainians

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia's filtration camps for Ukrainians first drew wide international attention on the 15th of March 2022, when The Guardian published accounts from witnesses in Mariupol. One woman described being bussed with two or three hundred others to the town of Novoazovsk. They waited for hours inside the buses. Then they were ordered through a row of tents to a place Russian officials called a filtration camp.

  A leaked Russian occupation plan described "filtration" as the foundation of a counter-insurgency and pacification strategy. The plan called for door-to-door sweeps of Ukrainian communities, aimed at compiling comprehensive counter-intelligence files on large portions of the population. The Russian government calls the entire system an "evacuation." That word raises a question: what, exactly, does this process do to the millions of Ukrainians who pass through it?

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• 2. The Filtration Process

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  One witness processed at the Bezimenne camp described her questioning by men who claimed to be FSB agents as "very degrading." Detainees face interrogation about their background, family ties, political views, and any knowledge of people serving in the Ukrainian armed forces. Those with ties to the Azov Regiment receive particular scrutiny.

  Detention inside these camps can last anywhere from hours to many weeks. Some Ukrainians were transported into filtration sites without knowing where they were going, falsely told they were headed to Ukrainian-held territory. Others were forcibly herded in by occupation forces. Once inside, detainees are told they cannot leave the surrounding town until filtration is complete.

  Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that five thousand Ukrainians were processed through the Bezimenne camp. During filtration, detainees are photographed, fingerprinted, and their phones are searched. Men, and in some instances women, are strip-searched for Ukrainian nationalist tattoos. Men are also inspected for bruising that might indicate recent use of body armor or a rifle. Officials have said the collected data populates a database. The leaked occupation plan described this database as a tool for monitoring and disrupting resistance networks.

  Michail Carpenter, the U.S. envoy to the OSCE, cited credible reporting about those suspected of ties to independent media or the military. They were reportedly beaten or tortured before transfer to the Donetsk region, "where they are reportedly disappeared or murdered." Some men face additional questioning as they travel through Russian-controlled territory after leaving the camp. Children are sometimes separated from their parents during filtration and transferred to Russia separately.

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• 3. Inside the Camps

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  The Izolatsia industrial plant in Donetsk has operated as a filtration facility since June 2014, long before the full-scale invasion of 2022. It became notorious for torture and summary executions. That facility continues to operate.

  As of June 2022, most filtration camps were located in towns and villages across the Donetsk People's Republic. Schools, cultural centres, sports halls, community centres, and police stations have all been converted into filtration sites. In July 2022, a U.S. diplomat told the OSCE that American officials had identified at least 18 such sites in both Ukrainian and Russian territory. Preparations for these camps had begun, the diplomat said, even before the invasion.

  Detainees have described sleeping on floors or on cardboard. Sanitary conditions are poor, and food rations are scant or altogether absent. In November 2024, the Belarusian Investigative Center, the Skhemy project, and Radio Liberty jointly published an investigation into a camp in the Belarusian town of Narovlya in the Gomel region, which had operated in 2022. The Polish spokesman for the Minister Coordinator of Special Services separately published the locations of six such camps. That article described them as places "where there are Russian torture chambers used against Ukrainians."

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• 4. Torture and Disappearances

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  Matilda Bogner, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, issued a report in November 2022. Its subject was practices at a penal colony near Olenivka. Russian officials called these "admission procedures." They included beatings, threats, dog attacks, mock executions, forced nudity, and both electric and positional torture. The UN agency had also received information about nine deaths at Olenivka in April 2022.

  One witness described filtration camp staff ordering detainees to record false statements on camera. The statements blamed Ukraine for the destruction of their own homes. Beatings and torture with electricity have been reported by people throughout the filtration system. Women and girls face risk of sexual violence. In May 2022, videos appeared on social media showing Ukrainian civilians apologizing to Russian soldiers. Some said they had undergone what they called a "denazification course."

  Human rights activist Pavel Lisyansky compared those courses to the Chinese government's "re-education" of Uyghurs. He described them as often accompanied by physical violence, moral pressure, and humiliation. He said he personally knows of three or four cases in which Ukrainian civilians were killed following conflicts with their assigned "curator." In each case, the victims' documents were destroyed afterward.

  In December 2022, OHCHR reported that Russian security services may have forcibly disappeared a woman in the Rostov region. She had failed the filtration process on the 10th of October of that year, and then vanished.

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• 5. Deported into Russia

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  Mikhail Mizintsev, chief of Russia's National Defense Management Center, stated in May 2022 that 1,185,791 people had been transferred into Russia. The U.S. State Department estimated that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians had passed through filtration and been deported. That figure includes 260,000 children. Ukrainian government sources and independent estimates put the total number of forcibly relocated Ukrainians between 1.6 million and 4.7 million. Among those, between 250,000 and 700,000 are children.

  Cities in the Russian Far East are among the destinations where deported Ukrainians are sent after filtration. On arrival in Russia, people are typically placed first in refugee centres. Russian officials pressure them to apply for asylum or Russian citizenship, threatening indefinite detention for those who refuse. The U.S. State Department described the deportations as a "pre-meditated" apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine.

  According to the U.S. State Department, Ukrainians are coerced into signing agreements to stay in Russia before being released from filtration camps. Those seeking temporary asylum must hand over their passports to receive an asylum card. They are not told they are entitled to retrieve the passport and exit Russia. Some come to believe, incorrectly, that they cannot leave. An ad hoc network of activists has emerged to help Ukrainians find a way out.

  On the 5th of March 2022, Putin signed a decree creating simplified administrative procedures for Ukrainians seeking asylum or citizenship. In April 2022, Russia adopted federal legislation streamlining citizenship applications for Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Donbas. Ukrainians arriving from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics are entitled to a one-time cash payment. Ukrainian intelligence has reported that those released from the camps are also offered employment in economically depressed regions of Russia. Officially, Ukrainians are not prohibited from leaving Russia; in practice, many face significant obstacles in doing so.

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• 6. The World Responds

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  Some Ukrainians who managed to reach Georgia avoided the forced deportations to Russian cities that typically follow filtration. Reports describe people slipping out of facilities in Taganrog, including a detention center known as SIZO-2, and from Rostov-on-Don. Some told filtration officials they had concrete plans to travel to a specific Russian city. This allowed them to be released to find their own way, enabling escape into Georgia.

  United States Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield addressed the camps directly. "I do not need to spell out what these so-called 'filtration camps' are reminiscent of," she said. "It's chilling and we cannot look away." She cited reports of FSB agents confiscating passports, identification documents, and mobile phones, as well as reports of Ukrainian families being separated. Ukrainian officials drew a comparison to the filtration camps Russia had previously operated in Chechnya. The Russian Embassy in the United States described the sites as "checkpoints for civilians leaving the zone of active hostilities."

  Tanya Lokshina, director of Human Rights Watch for Europe and Asia, put the legal framework in plain language. She explained that international human rights law does not require proof that people were "forced into a vehicle at gunpoint." Being left with no real choice is sufficient, she said. She also cited the Geneva Convention's prohibition on "individual or mass forcible transfers" from occupied territory; the ban applies "regardless of their motive." Some Ukrainians who passed through the filtration system have been interrogated again by Russian officials after arriving in Russia.

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