Russia carries out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories

The BBC quoted the American Institute for War Studies as saying this.

According to statistics, between 60,000 and 100,000 people, mostly those disloyal to the Russian authorities, have been forced to leave Crimea over the past eight years since its annexation. At least 30,000 of them are Crimean Tatars, while between 600,000 and one million Russians have moved to Crimea permanently from various Russian regions, according to different sources.

The leader of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, said earlier:

There has been an artificial replacement of the population in Crimea. It is about squeezing out, pushing out Crimean Tatars, ethnic Ukrainians who do not accept the occupation. At the same time a huge number of new arrivals from Russia have appeared, dominating the peninsula.

And so now, with the occupation of other territories of Ukraine, the Russian Federation is in fact repeating the Crimean scenario.

From all the villages and towns in the temporarily occupied territory there is information about the deportation of Ukrainians, which the occupiers call evacuation. And filtering measures and filtration camps are only the tip of the iceberg of their atrocities.

Ekaterina Rashevskaya, a lawyer with the Regional Centre for Human Rights, commented to the BBC:

An outflow of population from the occupied territories is generated and at the same time Russians are encouraged to come to them. These are military personnel, people who manage the territories. These are doctors and teachers. We know the facts when military personnel and officials came to the occupied territories with their families.

Ekaterina Rashevskaya notes that forced displacement, issuance of Russian passports, violence and intimidation of non-Russian ethnic groups, looting of material cultural heritage - all this leads to a change in the demographic situation in the occupied territories in such a way that those who do not recognize the occupation and the Russian authorities will be reduced.

Ekaterina Rashevskaya calls such actions "demographic engineering" of Russia, i.e. a set of different methods and means to achieve its goals. And she says that these methods do not differ from those used by Russia in Crimea since 2014.