Trucks from the Russian side took away in an unknown direction about a thousand refugees who were waiting in line in the Pskov region to cross the border with Estonia. This was announced by the Minister of the Interior of Estonia Lauri Läänemets, he was quoted by the local agency ERR.
“A little more than a thousand people were waiting at the border, but today they are no longer there – they were put into trucks and taken away. We don't know where. The police are currently investigating."
According to him, now the Estonian border guards are trying to find out, including with the help of drones, where the refugees were taken. The security forces will find out if people were transported to the border zone, as Belarus did last year on the border with Lithuania and Latvia.
In recent weeks, a queue of several thousand people has formed on the Russian side of the border with Estonia. Mostly Ukrainian refugees were waiting to pass the border, the procedure took several days. Läänemets said that Estonia has established contact with the Ukrainian embassy in order to verify information about Ukrainian citizens trying to leave the Russian Federation.
On September 30, adviser to the governor of the Pskov region, Anton Sergeev , told TASS that queues in the border areas of the Pskov region were caused by the "irhythmic work" of the border services of Estonia and Latvia. According to him, local authorities are organizing conditions for people waiting to pass the control.
In early August, pro-Kremlin media reported that about 3.2 million Ukrainian refugees had voluntarily arrived in Russia since the start of the war. However, the Ukrainian side has repeatedly said that these people were taken out of Ukraine by force. In July, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukrainians who had been forcibly taken to the Russian Federation were being deprived of their communications equipment and documents, as well as being intimidated and taken to remote areas of the country to complicate their return home. At the same time, all deportees are forced to go through filtration camps, the US authorities discovered at least 18 such places, which they began to prepare even before the invasion of Ukraine.
In September, the Civic Assistance Committee (a Russian public charitable organization for helping refugees) reported that the number of people who left or forcibly moved from Ukraine to Russia turned out to be an order of magnitude smaller than announced by the Russian authorities.