An American diplomat offers a stark assessment of Russian detention camps.

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After weeks of American reports of Russian detention camps where thousands of Ukrainians have been interrogated and tortured, a senior American diplomat has offered an official assessment of the sites, called “filtration camps” by Ukraine and its allies.

In a speech in Vienna on Thursday, the diplomat, Michael R. Carpenter, the American ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said that Russian soldiers had forced thousands of Ukrainian civilians out of their homes and into camps in Russian-controlled territory.

Through a “filtration process” involving beatings, torture and sexual violence, Mr. Carpenter said, Russian forces search for civilians who “owe even the slightest allegiance to the Ukrainian state.”

The camps have been set up in military tents, schools and sports centers, and Russia had planned for them long before it invaded Ukraine 11 weeks ago, said Mr. Carpenter, a former longtime aide to President Biden.

Mr. Carpenter described witness accounts in which Russian soldiers inspected women’s underpants, forced people to strip and examined scars and tattoos. The soldiers also confiscated passports and downloaded data from people’s phones, he said.

One survivor, Mr. Carpenter said, overhead a Russian soldier answering a question about what soldiers did with people who “didn’t pass the filtration.”

“Shot 10 and stopped counting,” the soldier was said to have responded.

The civilians who pass through the filtration process are transferred to the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, which Russia has been slowly capturing, where they “face a dark fate,” Mr. Carpenter said.

Mr. Carpenter said that Russia knew it was violating an international humanitarian law against the forced displacement of civilians. “We must not allow this evil to stand,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/13 ... e-war-news