Between 2017 and 2022, more than 7,000 human rights violations were documented in occupied Crimea by the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, 5,613 of which were against members of the Crimean Tatar people. Since Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in 2014, repressions have persisted, marked by accusations solely based on ethnicity and the Crimean Tatar’s unwavering fight for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. The relentless onslaught against the peninsula’s Indigenous people is nothing but a genocide, a researcher says.
In this Q&A session, the Ukrainian activist and politician Tamila Tasheva speaks about the Crimean Tatars’ history from the time under the Soviet regime in the 1940s to current events.
The Soviet and now the Russian authorities, in order to deal with a group of people [like the Crimean Tatars], have always tried to brand them as criminals, and as criminals who would be condemned by everyone around them and isolated. Here the strategy is the same although the words for marking people are different.