Many Ukrainians also come to Russia.

Most as refugees.

The man announcing Moscow's figures on this is Mikhail Mizintsev.

According to the 59-year-old colonel general, since the beginning of the "special military operation", as the war is called in Russia, exactly 1,062,692 people have been brought from Ukraine to Russia until last Saturday, "including 192,688 children".

Mizintsev mentions their number separately, and also treats the “people's republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk as “states”.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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Moscow has seen the entities as such since President Vladimir Putin recognized them shortly before the attack.

Information from Kyiv and the United Nations on the refugees coming to Russia from Ukraine is well below Mizintsev's figures.

More than 9500 temporary shelters for refugees

According to the state news agency Tass, he heads a "staff for the coordination of humanitarian responses in Ukraine".

At the same time, Mizintsev heads the National Defense Control Center at the General Staff, which plans Russia's military operations.

As a result, Britain imposed sanctions on Mizintsev in early April, linking him to attacks on civilian targets in Syria's Aleppo in 2015 and 2016, and recalling that the Ukrainian military blamed Mizintsev for the destruction of Mariupol.

"Butcher of Mariupol" he is called.

According to Mizintsev, there are more than 9,500 temporary shelters for refugees in Russia.

There they received help and would be distributed from the centers, said the colonel general on Saturday.

The dual role as auxiliary coordinator and planer of attack and defense (according to the Russian account, threats to Russians and Russia are being fought in Ukraine) is of central importance for the image that the public is supposed to have of the "special operation".

The transfer of civilians from the "People's Republics" to Russia, always accompanied by state television, began shortly before the attack to support the narrative of "genocide" in Donbass.

In the war, there are now regular reports in the state media designed to show refugees arriving in southwest Russia's Rostov region and being dispersed to various regions, from western Russia's Lipetsk to Kazan on the Volga to the Far East, thousands of miles from home.

No other choice

When the refugees, many of whom appear to be from Mariupol, complain in front of cameras about constant shelling, destruction and terrible conditions, that is not a contradiction to Kremlin propaganda.

According to her, however, Ukrainian forces are responsible for all the suffering.

It fits into this picture when Mizintsev, always in the style of an accountant, tells of "appeals for help" from Ukrainians who wanted to be taken to Russia, the "People's Republics" or southern Ukrainian areas that Russian forces have recently conquered.

"A total of 2,754,026 such requests from 2,133 settlements in Ukraine are in the database," said the colonel general.

The military offensive is supposed to appear as an imperative of humanity.

Russia took the war home to the people, who now mostly have no choice but to place themselves in Russian hands.

Mariupol, for example, has been surrounded by Russians for a long time.

Mikhail Podoliak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said recently that it will be difficult to bring people back to their homes after the war.

Podoljak referred to Moscow's experiences with the forced resettlement of entire peoples - only under the Soviet dictator Stalin this affected Germans, Crimeans and Chechens, among others - and emphasized that Russia would never admit that people had been forcibly deported.