Almost since the war began, Ukrainians have accused Russian forces of detaining civilians, interrogating them and in many cases forcing them not only from their homes but from their country.

Now, new details are emerging about the scope and scale of Russia’s use of “filtration camps,” makeshift detention centers Russia and proxy forces use to hold, interrogate and deport hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. A growing number of experts and officials believe the camps are part of a larger, orchestrated campaign to erase Ukrainian nationality that amounts to genocide.

"These sites are operating in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine and are believed to be black holes of human rights abuses."

...... Kristina Hook, assistant professor of conflict management, Kennesaw State University

Grid reviewed firsthand accounts from local news reports, Ukrainian and Russian government statements, international human rights reports, intelligence reports, satellite imagery and videos posted to social media to gain a better understanding of the truth on the ground. Much remains unknown about the camps’ operations or the fate of thousands of Ukrainians who have not been heard from since being taken to the camps.

Russia has moved an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainians, including over 200,000 children, to Russia and Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, according to both Russian and Ukrainian officials. Multiple reports show that Russian forces use an archipelago of filtration camps in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine to hold and scrutinize many of them. Ukrainians who have passed through the camps have reported treatment ranging from humiliation to verbal abuse and physical torture. They say Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine subjected them to strip searches, confiscated and searched their electronic devices, used electric shocks to torture them, and staged mock executions of detainees.

Russia’s troubling history of filtration camps

The filtration camps appear to serve purposes similar to Russian and Soviet camps in earlier conflicts, from World War II to the Chechen wars of the 1990s: to identify civilians who they believe can assimilate into Russian culture and Russian rule, and punish or remove those who won’t.

“Filtration camps are rooted in Soviet and Russian history,” said Khrystyna Holynska, a defense and policy researcher at the Rand Corporation. “It was a way to, first, get rid of those who could pose a threat to the regime by resisting it. And secondly, it is a way to spread fear and sow distrust among the rest to prevent them from even thinking about resisting.”

Some of those who pass the test of loyalty are freed; others have been kept in these camps in Russian-held territory or taken to Russia.

The growing number of accounts has led to widespread condemnation.

“Evidence is mounting that Russian authorities are detaining or disappearing thousands of Ukrainian civilians who do not pass ‘filtration,’” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a press statement.

An apparent Russian filtration center in the village of Bezimenne in Donetsk, Ukraine, on May 1, captured by a Chinese news photographer. Ukrainians evacuated from the Azovstal plant and adjacent houses in Mariupol were reportedly taken to this location

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) described Russia’s use of the filtration and deportation system as a war crime: “Mass forcible transfers of civilians during a conflict to the territory of the occupying party are prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.” The OSCE said the practice was “somewhat reminiscent of the extraordinary renditions used in the so-called war against terrorism,” referring to the U.S. mistreatment of detainees after 9/11. For historians and others with long memories, the system has invited more direct comparison to the infamous Gulag prison system created by the Soviet Union during the rule of Joseph Stalin.

“The ‘filtration’ camp language invokes loaded Russian words tracing back to World War II-era camps,” said Kristina Hook, an assistant professor of conflict management at Kennesaw State University. “Today, these sites are operating in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine and are believed to be black holes of human rights abuses.” Hook believes the filtration camps are part of a broader genocidal effort by Russia in Ukraine to erase Ukrainian national identity.

The numbers

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, both sides have inflated statistics and exaggerated claims to suit their narratives. But in terms of the sheer number of Ukrainians who have been “forcibly deported” (according to Ukraine) or “emigrated” (according to Russia), there is some agreement. In May, a Russian official acknowledged that “1,426,979 people, of which 238,329 are children,” had been “evacuated from dangerous areas of the republics of Donbas and Ukraine to the territory of the Russian Federation.” It’s broadly assumed that the Russians delivered most civilian deportees to filtration camps.

Lyudmila Denisova, the former Ukrainian Parliament commissioner for human rights, reported that Russia had deported 1,377,925 Ukrainians, 232,480 of whom were children, as of May 21. That number has since grown to over 1,700,000 Ukrainians as of June, according to the OSCE.

This accounts for those who have likely been through the camps and “released.” Questions remain about those that the Russian government decides to hold.

Stories from the camps

After months of mostly murky, secondhand accounts, multiple stories from the “filtration camps” have begun to emerge.

“There were 36 of us in a cell for six people,” Yevgeny Malyarchuk, a businessman from Mariupol, told Current Time TV, a Prague-based, Russian-language TV station operated by Radio Free Europe. “At the same time, not everyone could lie down, even sit down. Slept in several shifts. It was very hard.”

Malyarchuk said he was attempting to deliver aid to people during the Russian siege of Mariupol when he was captured and brought to a filtration camp. He said he was held for 100 days in a former penal colony in the Ukrainian town of Yelenovka, outside of Donetsk.

Other firsthand accounts describe humiliating interrogations that include being forced to strip naked so that Russians could check for tattoos that might then be taken as “evidence” for opposition to Russia or support for the Ukrainian resistance.

Russian forces and pro-Russian officials in eastern Ukraine have also searched detainees’ mobile electronic devices for anti-Russian sentiment in the form of pro-Ukrainian internet pages and social media groups, former detainees told Politico. A Ukrainian woman told CNN of her experience at a filtration camp: “Once you surrender your phone, they check you in for the first phase of the process. They photograph you from all angles, for facial recognition I suspect. Next you give them your fingerprints and, strangely, palm prints. I don’t know why.” She added that the Russians entered her details in a database. “The next stage, you go in for questioning.”

According to the Ukrainian non-governmental organization Crimea SOS, “In some instances, people are forced to sign testimonies that they were interrogated and tortured by Ukrainian forces.”

A group of Ukrainian aid workers captured by Russian forces and brought to the same former prison colony outside of Donetsk described the conditions there to Mediazona, an independent Russian publication.

The group, whose members were released after several weeks, reported beatings, sadistic prison guards, and minimal food or water at their filtration camp. They said the complex held both prisoners of war and civilians. They described the leadership of the prison camp by name and recalled details of their cruelty.

“Evsyukov Sergey Vladimirovich, in my personal opinion, is one of the worst executioners who manages this entire camp,” said Stanislav Glukshov, a transportation worker with the group. “[Vladimirovich] repeatedly told us that we would stay there for at least ten years, that our children, our families would be told that we flew into space, or that we are military pilots who died.”

“We will detain all bandits and fascists”

A review of news reports and government analyses indicates Russia and allied separatist groups have created filtration camps at police stations, decommissioned prisons and tent encampments. Most are in the People’s Republic of Luhansk and People’s Republic of Donetsk, the regions in eastern Ukraine that have been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February invasion

The United States last month released a declassified intelligence report on Russia’s “Systemic Filtration Operations,” which detailed much of what American analysts have gleaned about the program. The report, which a Defense Department official called “chilling,” identifies 18 camps.

Last week, Poland’s intelligence service publicized the coordinates of five locations in Ukraine it believed housed filtration camps. Grid reviewed Maxar satellite imagery of the locations, which showed nondescript buildings, a tent city, and lines of buses and other vehicles. Russia has not denied the existence of filtration camps — but challenged the suggestion that they are punitive in nature. The Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., framed the camps as part of an effort to foil saboteurs.

“We emphasize: in this case, we are talking about checkpoints for civilians leaving the zone of active hostilities,” the embassy said. “In order to avoid sabotage operations by the Ukrainian national battalions, servicemen of the [Russian Federation] Armed Forces carefully inspect vehicles heading to safe regions.

“We will detain all bandits and fascists. The Russian military does not create any barriers for the civilian population, but helps [them] to stay alive, provides them with food and medicine.”

The embassy has since referred to reports about the camps as “low-quality Western misinformation.” It did not respond to inquiries from Grid for this story.

Western analysts and diplomats don’t buy the Russian explanations. The camps are “designed to weed out those who cannot be forcibly Russified, that is, those who will not accept the Kremlin’s propagandistic claims that Ukrainian national identity is an artificial construct,” Kennesaw State’s Hook wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last week. Hook and others believe the camps are one aspect of a broader Russian effort to commit genocide against Ukrainians.

Beyond the camps, mystery and danger

Detainees whom the Russians believe have connections to the Ukrainian military or security services appear to receive the harshest treatment, most likely including being sent to prisons in eastern Ukraine or Russia. In their July report, U.S. officials cautioned that “little is known about their fates.”

Ukrainians without apparent ties to the military, but whom the Russians consider of possible concern — perhaps for their pro-Ukrainian sentiment or resistance to Russian occupation — appear to be leading candidates for forcible deportation to Russia.

Those detainees who are not considered a threat receive official documentation and are permitted to leave the camps. At that point they face a choice: remain in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine or be forcibly transported into the Russian interior.

Meanwhile, it appears that Russia has moved many Ukrainian civilians from the camps to far-flung spots in Russia.

One woman told CNN that at the Russian border, those with no family or friends in Russia were being sent nearly 1,000 miles east, to the city of Vladimir. But other reports suggest Ukrainians have been sent on even longer journeys.

A May investigation by British outlet I News found 66 “former Soviet sanatoriums, children’s wilderness camps, hostels and orphanages,” often in extremely remote parts of Russia, were the final destinations for many Ukrainians who had passed through the filtration camps.

The news site found a group of 300 people who had been sent to Vladivostok, the largest city in Russia’s far east, thousands of miles from Ukraine, after a seven-day train trip on the Trans-Siberian Express. Vladivostok is closer to Tokyo than to Moscow.

While Ukrainians are free to leave such sites, the remoteness and lack of resources can effectively force them to remain, according to the I News investigation.

The fate of children

Human rights advocates believe Russians have separated Ukrainian children from their parents at the filtration camps and placed Ukrainian orphans with Russian families.

Michelle Bachelet, the high commissioner for human rights at the United Nations, told the Human Rights Council that her office is looking into allegations that children in orphanages had been taken to Russia. According to UNICEF, Ukraine had more than 91,000 children in orphanages before the Russian invasion.

Deputy head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration Zlata Nekrasova stays by Alisa, 4, who travelled unaccompanied during the recent evacuation from the Azovstal steelworks, Zaporizhzhia, southeastern Ukraine. The girl and mother, a healthcare worker, who had been sheltering at one of the Azovstal bunkers, were separated by Russian invaders at a filtration camp in the so-called 'DNR'. (Dmytro Smolyenko/Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

BuzzFeed News reported that Russia is transporting Ukrainian children across the border, a violation of international law. The outlet recounted the harrowing story of a grandmother searching for her missing 3-year-old granddaughter and described Russians “evacuating” children from Ukrainian orphanages to Russia. Ukrainian children from orphanages are being adopted by Russian families, according to the report.

What we don’t know

Those who have studied the allegations about the filtration camp system are quick to point out that these are stories from the survivors — the people who have passed through the system and emerged to speak about the experience. Virtually everything we know about filtration camps is based on their accounts.

There are likely hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians still held — either in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine or inside Russia itself. There are those in Russia who are technically “free to leave” but likely lacking any means to do so. And there are those children who have been taken to Russia.

“Most of the information on what is going on in these camps we get from the people who managed to ‘pass’ the filtration,” said Holynska at Rand. “They report on what they could observe or overhear. They talk about the inhumane conditions they had to endure until they were released.

“We have very limited information on those who are not released.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

Do you have information about filtration camps? We want to hear from you. Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or on WhatsApp or Signal at 202-999-9679.

TOPICS RUSSIAUKRAINECRIME

Satellite image showing red building and blue tents

A satellite view shows cars outside the filtration camp at Bezimenne, Ukraine, on March 2

• By Toby Luckhurst & Olga Pona BBC News, Lviv 25 April 2022

• Olena and Oleksandr in the relative safety of Lviv, after escaping Mariupol

  "You can't imagine how horrible the conditions were."

  Evgeniy and Valentyna managed to survive by hiding in their basement

  Oleksandr and Olena are two of the lucky few who recently managed to escape from Mariupol, which is now almost under full Russian control after weeks of bombardment.

  The city is effectively sealed off from the world, and information about what is happening inside is difficult to confirm independently.

  But the pair, and others, have given chilling accounts of life in Russia's so-called filtration camps, set up outside Mariupol to house civilians before they are evacuated.

  Oleksandr and Olena, speaking from the relatively safe western city of Lviv, say they ended up at one of the centres when they tried to escape the city. After walking from their home to an evacuation point, they were driven to a Russian refugee hub at a former school in the village of Nikolske, north-west of Mariupol.

  "It was like a true concentration camp," Oleksandr, 49, says.

  The centres have been compared by Ukrainian officials to those used during Russia's war in Chechnya, when thousands of Chechens were brutally interrogated and many disappeared.

  Oleksandr and Olena were fingerprinted, photographed from all sides, and interrogated for several hours by Russian security officers - "like in a prison", he says.

  They worried that the Russians would look at their phones, and so they cleared all evidence from their devices of anything to do with Ukraine - including photos of their daughter in front of a Ukrainian flag.

  They were right to worry. Oleksandr says that during their interrogation, Russian security officers examined photographs, phone call history and contact numbers on their devices for links with journalists or government and military officials.

  • Thousands of Mariupol civilians taken to Russia
  • The Mariupol street strewn with bodies

  "If a person was suspected of being a 'Ukrainian Nazi', they took them to Donetsk for further investigation or murder," says Oleksandr, although the BBC has not been able to verify this claim. "It was very dangerous and risky. Any small doubt, any small resistance - and they could take you to the basements for interrogation and torture. Everybody was afraid to be taken to Donetsk."

  President Vladimir Putin has stated one of the aims of his invasion is to clear Ukraine of Nazis, and Russian propaganda has made numerous baseless allegations that Ukraine is somehow aligned with Nazism.

  Eventually the pair were detained and put on a list for evacuation. But the ordeal did not stop there.

  A secret escape

  Elderly people slept in corridors without mattresses or blankets, Olena says. There was only one toilet and one sink for thousands of people. Dysentery soon began to spread. "There was no way to wash or clean," she says. "It smelt extremely awful."

  Soap and disinfectant ran out on the second day they were there. Soon, too, did toilet paper and sanitary pads.

  Olena and Oleksandr were told they had permission to leave on the 148th evacuation bus. But a week later, just 20 buses had left the facility.

  In contrast, there were many buses organised to go to Russian territory. Authorities even tried to force the couple on to a coach heading east, they say. In the end Olena and Oleksandr felt compelled to seek the help of private drivers, who they feared could be Russians or collaborators.

  "We didn't have any choice - either be forcibly deported to Russia or risk it with these private drivers," Olena says.

  It's a dilemma that Mariupol's mayor, Vadym Boychenko, recognises. "Many buses of civilians go to Russian rather than Ukrainian territory," he told the BBC, over the phone. "From the beginning of war, [the Russians] didn't allow any way to evacuate civilians. It's a direct military order to kill civilians," he claimed.

  Oleksandr and Olena's driver managed to get them from their filtration camp to the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk - through "fields, dirt roads, narrow pathways behind all the checkpoints", Olena says, because they didn't have the proper documents to pass a Russian inspection.

  They then spent three days looking for a route out before finding another driver who was willing to risk everything to get them to Ukrainian-controlled territory. He managed to get around 12 Russian checkpoints and safely deliver them to Zaporizhzhia. The couple then took an overnight train to Lviv.

  "From filtration camps you can only escape using these risky local private drivers," Oleksandr says. "Fortunately, there are good people among them."

  Camps like 'ghettos'

  Arriving in Lviv on the same day were Valentyna and her husband Evgeniy. They also managed to flee Mariupol last week. They were boarding a coach to a smaller city in western Ukraine - desperate for safety after their ordeal.

  The situation in Mariupol, they said, had become dire. They survived by sheltering in a basement, living of tinned goods, a handful of potatoes they grew in their garden, and water taken from the boiler.

  The filtration process was speedy for them, says Valentyna, 58, perhaps because of their age and because Evgeniy has a disability. But it was far worse for younger people, she said.

  "The filtration camps are like ghettos," she says. "Russians divide people into groups. Those who were suspected of having connections with the Ukrainian army, territorial defence, journalists, workers from the government - it's very dangerous for them. They take those people to prisons to Donetsk, torture them."

  She and Evgeniy also say many were sent from the filtration camps to Russia. Sometimes people were told they were destined for Ukrainian-controlled territory, they say, only for the coach to head to Russian-held territory instead.

  Like Oleksandr and Olena, Valentyna says it was only because of their driver that they managed to escape.

  "When we finally [escaped] and saw the Ukrainian fighters and the flag, when we heard Ukrainian language, everyone in the bus started to cry," she said. "It was just unbelievable that we stayed alive and finally fled from hell."

  Both couples have now escaped Mariupol, a city that has become a symbol of the resistance and the suffering of Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Now they face an uncertain future - just four of the 11 million Ukrainians displaced by the conflict.

  "The city does not exist anymore," Valentyna says. "Even walls. Just huge piles of ruins. I could never have imagined such violence."

  Related topics

  • Russia-Ukraine war Russia Ukraine

‘Absolute evil’: inside the Russian prison camp where dozens of Ukrainians burned to death

Entrepreneur Anna Vorosheva accuses Moscow of murder after spending 100 days in the Olenivka detention centre

• Russian-Ukraine war – latest updates

Screams from soldiers being tortured, overflowing cells, inhuman conditions, a regime of intimidation and murder. Inedible gruel, no communication with the outside world, and days marked off with a home-made calendar written on a box of tea.

This, according to a prisoner who was there, is what conditions are like inside Olenivka, the notorious detention centre outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers burned to death in a horrific episode late last month while in Russian captivity.

Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account to the Observer of her time inside the jail. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine.

She had been trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, her home city, which the Russian army had besieged. The separatists arrested her and drove her in a packed police van to the prison, where she was held until early July on charges of “terrorism”.

Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We are talking about absolute evil,” she said.

The fighters were blown up on 29 July in a mysterious and devastating explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building.

Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to confirm these figures and has called for an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, holding out underground.

A day before the blast, they were transferred to a separate area in the camp’s industrial zone, some distance from the grimy two-storey concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other women prisoners. Video shown on Russian state TV revealed charred bodies and twisted metal bunk beds.

“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those ‘killed’ in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death,” she said.

Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten, then locked up again. “We heard their cries,” she said. “They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time. Investigators would joke about it and ask inmates, ‘What happened to your face?’ The soldier would reply, ‘I fell over’, and they would laugh.

“It was a demonstration of power. The prisoners understood that anything could happen to them, that they might easily be killed. A small number of the Azov guys were captured before the mass surrender in May.”

Vorosheva said there was constant traffic around Olenivka, known as correctional colony No 120. A former Soviet technical school, it was converted in the 1980s into a prison, and later abandoned. The DNR began using it earlier this year to house enemy civilians.

Captives arrived and departed every day at the camp, 20km south-west of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva told the Observer. Around 2,500 people were held there, with the figure sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, she estimated. There was no running water or electricity.

The atmosphere changed when around 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of 17 May, she said. Russian flags were raised and the DNR colours taken down. Guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. Later they talked openly about how they were going to brutalise and humiliate them, she said.

“We were frequently called Nazis and terrorists. One of the women in my cell was an Azovstal medic. She was pregnant. I asked if I could give her my food ration. I was told, ‘No, she’s a killer’. The only question they ever asked me was, ‘Do you know any Azov soldiers?’”

Conditions for the female inmates were grim. She said they were not tortured but received barely any food – 50g of bread for dinner and sometimes porridge. “It was fit for pigs,” she said. She suspected the prison governor siphoned off money allocated for meals. The toilets overflowed and the women were given no sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded they slept in shifts. “It was tough. People were crying, worried about their kids and families.” Asked if the guards ever showed sympathy, she said an anonymous person once left them a bottle of shampoo.

According to Vorosheva, the camp’s staff were brainwashed by Russian propaganda and considered Ukrainians to be Nazis. Some were local villagers. “They blamed us for the fact that their lives were terrible. It was like an alcoholic who says he drinks vodka because his wife is no good.

“The philosophy is: ‘Everything is horrible for us, so everything should be horrible for you’. It’s all very communist.”

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called the explosion “a deliberate Russian war crime and a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war”. Last week, his office and Ukraine’s defence ministry gave details of clues which they say point to the Kremlin’s guilt.

Citing satellite images and phone intercepts and intelligence, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to the fact a row of graves was dug in the colony a few days before the blast.

The operation was approved at the “highest level” in Moscow, they allege. “Russia is not a democracy. The dictator is personally responsible for everything, whether it’s MH17, Bucha or Olenivka,” one intelligence source said. “The question is: when will Putin acknowledge his atrocities.”

One version of events being examined by Kyiv is that the blast may have been the result of intra-service rivalries between Russia’s FSB and GRU military intelligence wings. The GRU negotiated Azovstal’s surrender with its Ukrainian army counterpart, sources suggest – a deal the FSB may have been keen to wreck.

The soldiers should have been protected by guarantees given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that the Azov detainees would be properly treated. Since the blast, the Russians have refused to give international representatives any access to the site.

Vorosheva said the Red Cross were allowed into the camp in May. She said the Russians took the visitors to a specially renovated room and did not allow them to talk independently to the prisoners. “It was a show,” she said. “We were asked to give our clothes’ size and told the Red Cross would hand out something. Nothing reached us.”

Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events and said the Azov soldiers were treated worse than civilians. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal the guards took anyone they suspected of misbehaviour to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings.

They emerged limping and moaning, he said. Some captives were forced to crawl back to their cells. Another prisoner, Stanislav Hlushkov, said an inmate who was regularly beaten was found dead in solitary confinement. Orderlies put a sheet over his head, loaded him into a mortuary van and told fellow inmates he had “committed suicide”.

Vorosheva was freed on 4 July. It was, she said, a “miracle”. “The guards read out the names of those who were going to be freed. Everyone listened in silence. My heart leaped when I heard my name. I packed my things but didn’t celebrate. There were cases where people were on the list, got out, then came back.”

She added: “The people who run the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union. They could only behave well if they thought nobody was looking.”