UN representative: Deportation of Ukrainian citizens from occupied Crimea ongoing

As Vitaliy Khylko, a representative of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said on the air of Dom TV channel, citizens of Ukraine, who do not have passports of the Russian Federation and live in Crimea without a so-called residence permit, are subject to deportation.

Such persons are considered foreigners under the legislation of the Russian Federation.

“In 2020, we documented 178 cases when ‘courts’ in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea delivered judgments obliging this category of people to leave Crimea. In particular, 105 citizens of Ukraine received such a ‘judicial’ precept,” Khylko said.

According to him, 416 people (at least 292 of them are citizens of Ukraine) were ordered to pay a fine for violating the so-called migration rules in force in Russia.

Khylko noted that those are usually ordinary Crimean residents who had lived on the peninsula before and stayed here after 2014.

"The only thing that needs to be clarified is that these people did not receive a Russian passport and do not have a certificate of temporary or permanent residence. Usually, these are persons who do not have a residence permit in Crimea. I underscore – ‘usually’ – because there are exceptions. Perhaps, some of them came to Crimea after the occupation to work or visit their relatives, or just use the right to move freely across the territory of Ukraine," added the representative of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.

It is noted that there are two types of deportation – forced and voluntary departure. If a "court" orders that a person must leave voluntarily but a person did not leave the occupied territory, he or she is detained again and already faces the forced deportation.

“In case of forced deportation, the detainees are placed in detention centers. And these persons will be deported. We document such cases. They are deported either first to the territory of the Russian Federation (usually to Rostov region) and then to the territory of Ukraine through Kharkiv region, or directly through the administrative border with Crimea to the territory of mainland Ukraine,” Khylko explained.

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