The Kremlin, accused of deporting hundreds of thousands to Russia, claims they went voluntarily.

Russia’s foreign minister said nearly a million people have been moved from Ukraine to Russia in voluntary “evacuations” — one of the Kremlin’s most public attempts yet to counter accounts from witnesses, Ukrainian officials and Western observers who say that many Ukrainians have been forcibly deported.

Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister, told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency that 975,000 people, including 119,000 who are neither Ukrainian nor Russian, had been relocated. Russia’s Defense Ministry said this week that more than 180,000 children had been “evacuated” to Russian territory since Feb. 24, and it said that Russia had received requests to evacuate a total of 2.7 million people.

Russian authorities have portrayed efforts to bring Ukrainians to Russia as a humanitarian operation. Ukrainian officials, Western analysts and civilians in eastern Ukraine tell a very different story. Read more

@nytimes