Latest news with #CrimeanTatars
Yahoo
5 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Ukrainian abducted in Russian-occupied Crimea; Ukraine's ombudsman appeals to Moscow
A Ukrainian citizen disappeared in Russian-occupied Crimea earlier in May after being detained by people who presented themselves as Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, Ukraine's Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said on May 29. Serhii Hrishchenkov was taken in Sevastopol overnight on May 7, and his whereabouts are currently unknown, said Lubinets, who received an appeal from the man's daughter. Lubinets added that he had appealed to his Russian counterpart, Tatyana Moskalkova, regarding the case. At the time of publication, the Russian ombudsman's office had not issued a public reaction. The Ukrainian ombudsman stressed that Hrishchenkov's disappearance is "not an isolated case," with other people being kidnapped by alleged FSB officers. "This case of a Ukrainian citizen once again demonstrates the inability of the occupation authorities to ensure the implementation of international civil and political rights for residents of occupied Crimea," Lubinets said in a statement on Telegram. "Cynicism and human rights violations have become commonplace for thousands of Ukrainian citizens!" Russian occupation of Crimea, ongoing since 2014, has been accompanied by a harsh crackdown on civil and political rights and persecution of Ukrainian activists, Crimean Tatars, and others. Read also: How much does a Russian drone attack on Ukraine cost? The question is more complicated than it sounds We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Stalin's image returns to Moscow's subway, honoring a brutal history
Among those admiring the work on a recent visit was Liliya A. Medvedeva, who said she was 'very happy that our leader got restored.' Advertisement 'We won the war thanks to him,' said Medvedeva, a pensioner born in 1950, adding that she was grateful that Stalin didn't send her father to the Gulag even though he was taken prisoner during World War II — something that was equated with treason at the time. 'Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.' In a country where criticizing government action can be dangerous, it is unclear how many people disagree with Medvedeva's positive view, but some are dismayed, even enraged, by what they see as revisionist whitewashing of history. Advertisement Vladimir, a 25-year-old history student who refused to give his last name for fear of retribution, said he came to watch the crowd drawn by Stalin, whom he called 'a bloody tyrant.' 'It is hard for me to express my own opinion,' he said. 'But no other monument would draw as much attention.' Stalin was responsible for mass purges, including the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, when more than 700,000 people were executed, including military leaders, intellectuals, members of ethnic minorities, landowning peasants, and others. Under his leadership, entire ethnic groups, like Crimean Tatars, were expelled from their homelands. His policies contributed to mass famine across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. But nostalgia for the Soviet era is strong, especially among older generations traumatized by the painful transition to capitalism, reinforcing memories of Stalin as a strongman who imposed order on a sprawling country and led it to victory against Nazi Germany. His admirers see purges, famines, and mass deportations as 'excesses' for which overzealous local officials were mostly responsible. Since Vladimir Putin took power more than 25 years ago, at least 108 monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia, and the pace has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said Ivan Zheyanov, a historian and journalist who has kept track of the statues. One was installed this year in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, currently occupied by Russia's forces. But none of them have the visibility of the new sculpture in the subway, passed daily by legions of Muscovites changing between the main circle line and the purple line. Advertisement For years the Kremlin tried to maintain something of a balance, taking note of Stalin's repressions while opposing the liberal intelligentsia whose main ideological tenets included anti-Stalinism. Putin has repeatedly condemned Stalin over the years, and recognized that terrible crimes were committed under his rule. He has visited the sites of mass graves and convened human rights activists and historians to discuss Stalinism. In 2001, Moscow City Hall founded the Gulag History Museum, which vividly showcased how a system of mass labor camps led to as many as 2 million deaths. But for several years, something entirely different has been happening in parallel. The Memorial, the most prominent Russian civil rights organization founded by dissidents during late Soviet times, was declared a foreign agent in 2014. At the end of 2021, Moscow City Court ordered it to disband. In 2017, Putin told filmmaker Oliver Stone that 'excessive demonization of Stalin has been one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia.' After a series of lengthy trials, Yuri A. Dmitriev, an amateur historian who discovered graves of Stalin's victims in a remote pine forest in northern Russia, was sentenced in 2021 to 15 years in prison. Dmitriev had been found guilty of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter, charges his family and friends dismissed as fabricated. The Gulag History Museum was shut down in 2024 citing fire regulations and has not reopened. Roman Romanov, its longtime director, was removed from his post and the museum's exhibits are being redone under a new leadership. This April, the government renamed Volgograd's airport for Stalingrad, as the city was called from 1925 to 1961, honoring both the colossal battle fought there in World War II and the ruler it had been named for. Advertisement 'The creeping re-Stalinization of the country is dangerous not only for society, as it justifies the largest government atrocities in the country's history, but also for the state,' said Lev Shlosberg, a Russian opposition politician and member of the liberal Yabloko party that started a petition to dismantle the monument in the Moscow metro. 'Sooner or later, repression consumes the government itself.'
The Guardian
27-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘Does he know anything?': Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev on Trump's plans to legitimise Russian annexation
When Mustafa Dzhemilev read the news about Donald Trump's plan for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, he could not believe his eyes. Part of the US administration's peace plan, say recent reports, would involve Washington recognising annexed Crimea as legitimate Russian territory, among other concessions to the Kremlin that Trump hopes might stop Russia's war on Ukraine. 'The whole world knows what happened in Crimea … It would be such a damage to the reputation of the US that it will be hard for them to recover. It would be shameful,' said Dzhemilev, a Soviet-era dissident turned Crimean Tatar political leader, in an interview at his office in Kyiv. Back in March 2014, during the Russian annexation, Dzhemilev was asked for his public declaration of support for Moscow's takeover by Vladimir Putin himself. The Russian president spoke by telephone to Dzhemilev, promising money and support for the Crimean Tatar community in exchange for his backing. 'He explained how we'll be so happy under Russian rule,' Dzhemilev said, recalling the conversation with disdain. Dzhemilev turned down the deal, saying that after centuries of oppressing the Crimean Tatars, the Russians were unlikely to change, and telling Putin the best thing he could do was remove his troops from the peninsula. A month later, when returning to Crimea from Kyiv, he was stopped at the new Russian frontier and told he was banned from entering. He has lived in exile in Kyiv ever since. Unlike government officials, who are required to moderate their opinions of the Trump administration for the sake of diplomatic nicety, the 81-year-old Dzhemilev pulls no punches. He talks quietly yet with a sharp turn of phrase and a dark sense of humour, pausing every few minutes to light a fresh cigarette or answer his mobile phone, set to a barking dog ringtone. 'We are in a situation where the head of the US administration, the president, is now a person who feels no emotions, in whose head there is only deal-making … To say the things he says, to say Ukraine shouldn't have started this war. Have they been keeping this man in the dark for the last years? Does he know anything? Has he read anything?' He recalled an interview with Trump's Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, who failed to remember the names of all the regions he believed Russia had a reasonable claim to. 'That's a diplomat from the United States of America? I've seen a lot of stupid diplomats in my life, but one like him, that's a first,' he said. This is not Dzhemilev's first exile. In May 1944, when he was six months old, Joseph Stalin had the entire Crimean Tatar population rounded up and deported to Soviet Central Asia on cattle wagons, accusing them of collaboration during the Nazi occupation. Tens of thousands died on the journey. The Crimean Tatars had been the majority of the population in Crimea until the first Russian annexation, under Catherine the Great in the 18th century. In the intervening years, Russians had begun to dominate, and after Stalin's deportation every single Crimean Tatar was removed. From exile, Dzhemilev and other dissidents campaigned for a return. He received the first of many jail sentences in 1966 for refusing to do his military service, saying he could not fight in the army of the country that had stolen his homeland. It was not until 1989 that Crimean Tatars were officially allowed to return, where they found a very different Crimea and a local population that often viewed them as intruders. Many of their houses had been seized and their villages destroyed. Dzhemilev was elected chair of the Mejlis, the informal parliament of the Crimean Tatars, in 1991. During the early years of Ukrainian rule, Crimean Tatars were often accused of being separatists, wanting their own homeland in Crimea. In the end, they turned out to be some of Ukraine's fiercest defenders in the region. Since the annexation, Russia has launched multiple waves of persecution and arrests against the community, which is estimated to number around 250,000, or about 10% of the population of Crimea. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Many Crimean Tatars have agreed to work with Russian authorities, but Dzhemilev insists that most have done so only under pressure. He conceded, however, that 11 years of Russian rule had made an impact. Children who were in kindergarten at the time of the annexation will soon be old enough to be mobilised into the Russian army, having had a decade of schooling in the Russian curriculum. 'Of course, this has an effect on some people's consciousness,' he said. Still, he believes that many Crimean Tatar families will ensure their children do not lose sight of their history, and is heartened by one of his own earliest memories, as a young schoolboy in 1953, when it was announced on the radio that Stalin had died. 'Everyone was crying, but not the Crimean Tatars. The first thing my dad said was, 'Finally, the dog has kicked it',' he remembered. A relative came by with some onions, in case crying on demand was required. Dzhemilev spent a total of 15 years in prisons and camps during the Soviet period, after seven different court cases. 'The biggest single sentence I got was three years. By today's Russian standards I guess they would have shot me 10 times. They are destroying the lives of people by giving them 17 or 20 years for some small thing that was overheard,' he said. There was a moment, in late 2022 and 2023, when Ukraine's army was on the offensive against the Russians and anything seemed possible, including Kyiv winning back Crimea. Dzhemilev recalled how, at the end of 2023, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, came to visit him, suggesting he record a New Year's Eve address that Ukrainian hackers could show on television channels in Crimea, replacing Putin's. In the address, Dzhemilev announced that 2024 would be the final year of Russian rule and advised recent arrivals to return to Russia. That did not happen. 'It seems the liberation of Crimea has been postponed,' he conceded. If the US does recognise Crimea, Dzhemilev hopes international leaders will put some kind of pressure on Russia to give guarantees to the Crimean Tatars. He has called on Turkey to push for the creation of an international monitoring group to work in Crimea, and for members of the Mejlis to be given the freedom to travel to Crimea with immunity from prosecution under Russian law. He was due to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a diplomatic forum in Antalya in April to put the request to him in person. The pair have met several times before, but this time Erdoğan cancelled the meeting, citing a packed schedule, and sent a deputy instead, Dzhemilev said: 'One of his aides said to me that it wasn't really about time, it was because this is a person who likes to be able to fulfil people's requests. And he knew more or less what I was going to ask, and he knows he won't be able to fulfil it.' Dzhemilev's biography has a sad symmetry to it: decades of exile culminating in a return home, only for another exile to begin. He dismissed any personal hardship, noting that his years in the gulag had made him accustomed to being far from home. 'Personally, I am quite comfortable, I have no complaints. But the fact that our people fought to return home after the 1944 deportation for half a century and now are once again in a forced deportation, that is quite awful,' he said.
Ammon
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Ammon
Remembrance Day of the Victims of the Genocide against the Crimean Tatars
Myroslava Shcherbatiuk- Ambassador of Ukraine to Jordan May 18 is designated by the Ukrainian parliament as the Remembrance Day of the victims of the genocide of the indigenous Muslim people of Crimea – Crimean Tatars. On this day in 1944 the Soviet totalitarian regime committed one of the gravest crimes in its history — the forced mass deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people from their historical homeland - Crimea. Acting on Joseph Stalin's personal order, the Soviet authorities decided to «completely cleanse» the peninsula of Crimean Tatars. This was an act of ethnic cleansing aimed at destroying the Crimean Tatars as an Indigenous people and national community, thereby enabling the full-scale colonization of the region. This crime was particularly devious, as the majority of the victims were women, children, and the elderly, while thousands of Crimean Tatar men were serving on the front lines of the World War II as part of the Red Army. At dawn of May 18 a large-scale operation by the NKVD (KGB) began simultaneously across Crimea. Armed officers stormed into homes, giving families only 10-20 minutes to gather their belongings before being forcibly expelled. By May 20, the Soviet authorities deported to remote regions of the Soviet Union by freight trains in total over 190 thousand Crimean Tatars, including more than 92,000 children under the age of 16. Deportees were transported in overcrowded cattle cars, without access to food, clean water or medical care. The journey to these remote settlements typically lasted two to three weeks. During the transportation alone from 7,000 to 8,000 people died from thirst, disease, exhaustion and the inhumane conditions. Upon arrival in exile Crimean Tatars faced forced labor, starvation, unsanitary conditions, widespread disease and total social isolation. They were resettled in specially designated, segregated areas known as «special settlements», which were operating as Soviet reservations. These settlements were subject to strict surveillance: mandatory registration at commandants' offices, prohibition from leaving the area and constant oversight by repressive authorities. Being a Crimean Tatar was a sentence, as these people were given the status of «special settlers» which entailed lifelong discrimination, restriction of basic rights such as freedom of movement, access to education, healthcare and employment in qualified professions. In Uzbekistan alone, according to official Soviet records, approximately 30,000 Crimean Tatars died within the first 18 months. In some areas, mortality rates reached 60–70%. According to the Crimean Tatar national movement, the actual death toll was likely even higher. Any attempt to leave the settlements could result in arrest, and repeated violations were punishable by up to 20 years of hard labor. In addition, nearly 6,000 individuals were sent directly to GULAG labor camps. Following the mass expulsion, the Soviet regime began erasing every trace of the Crimean Tatar presence in Crimea. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was turned into a regular administrative region. Crimean Tatar toponyms were russified, mosques were destroyed or converted into utility buildings, and settlers from other Soviet republics were relocated to the homes of the deportees. The Crimean Tatar language, literature, historical documents and cultural artifacts were systematically destroyed or replaced with Russian ones. Even mentioning the deportation — known as Sürgünlik — was prohibited, and the term «Crimean Tatar» itself was nearly eliminated from the public use. Following the death of Joseph Stalin and the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatars were still denied the right to return to their homeland — Crimea. In effect, their forced exile became indefinite. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a national movement emerged, advocating for the restoration of Crimean Tatars' rights and their return to their homeland. The movement employed peaceful methods: public appeals, large-scale petition campaigns, non-violent protests and unauthorized returns to Crimea despite the official ban. It became one of the most extensive and longest-running human rights movements in the Soviet Union. In July 1987 hundreds of Crimean Tatars staged demonstrations on the Red Square in Moscow, publicly demanding the right to return. Under sustained public pressure in 1989 the Soviet authorities finally lifted the formal ban on Crimean Tatars residing in Crimea. After this decision a mass return of Crimean Tatars to their homeland began. By the late 1980s and especially in 1990–1991, thousands of families began their journey to homeland. The return was spontaneous and extremely difficult: the state provided no housing or support. Many families had to live in tents, dugouts or temporary shelters, building homes and infrastructure on their own. In response to bureaucratic resistance, particularly regarding land allocation, the community organized itself and founded around 300 new settlements in Crimea. In 1991 the institutional representation of the Crimean Tatar people was restored. On 26 June 1991 the historic Second Qurultay of the Crimean Tatar People was held in Simferopol, reviving the tradition of the national self-governance which began in 1917. The Qurultay proclaimed the restoration of the people's right to self-governance in Crimea and established the representative body — the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People. The Mejlis became the legitimate voice of Crimean Tatars and worked with Ukrainian state authorities and the international community on issues of repatriation, restitution of property rights, education, language, and cultural development. Upon returning home, the Crimean Tatar people actively engaged in reviving their culture, language, and religious life, despite significant initial challenges. In the early years of repatriation, the Crimean Tatar Drama Theatre resumed its work, the folk ensemble Qırım was founded, and institutions such as the Ismail Hasprinskyi Library and the Museum of History and Culture of the Crimean Tatar People were established. The media began broadcasting and publishing in the Crimean Tatar language. Communities reopened mosques and reclaimed religious buildings that had been used as museums or warehouses under the Soviet rule. Schools were established with the tuition in Crimean Tatar language. After the Russian Federation occupied the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014, the genocidal practices initiated during the Soviet period were revived. The Russian occupation administration launched the systematic campaign of pressure, persecution, and displacement targeting the Crimean Tatar community — one of the most prominent centers of the non-violent resistance to the occupation. From the very beginning, the actions of the Russian occupation regime were aimed at destroying the identity, culture, political rights of this indigenous people of Ukraine in Crimea. In the first years of the Russian occupation the activities of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People — the legitimate representative body recognized by the international community — were banned. In 2016 a Russian court designated the Mejlis as an «extremist organization» depriving Crimean Tatars of the right to collective representation. Peaceful assemblies - including commemorative events marking the anniversary of the 1944 deportation on 18 May – as well as the use of the Crimean Tatar symbols, and public remembrance of genocide victims were either banned or severely restricted. Prominent leaders, activists and human rights advocates were forced to leave Crimea, while others became targets of criminal prosecution, political pressure and smear campaigns in the media. Russian security forces in occupied Crimea carry out systematic searches of Crimean Tatar homes, arrests on fabricated charges, torture, abuse, and enforced disappearances. One of the key tools of the repression is prosecution of Crimean Tatars based on accusations of involvement in extremist organizations. Dozens of Crimean Tatars received lengthy sentences (up to 17–20 years) for alleged terrorism without any proof. Among the victims of such cases are journalists, human rights advocates, members of the Crimean Solidarity movement, and other pro-Ukrainian activists. At the same time, the occupation administration pursues the deliberate policy of cultural erasure and forced assimilation. All independent Crimean Tatar media outlets, including the ATR channel were shut down. Opportunities to receive education in the Crimean Tatar language were severely reduced, and history programs in schools were altered in order to reflect the Russian imperial interpretations. Traditional cultural events were banned and the public use of the Crimean Tatar language, symbols and religious practices are increasingly restricted. All these repressive actions occur against the backdrop of demographic shifts: thousands of Crimean Tatars are once again being forced to leave their homeland due to the atmosphere of fear, continuous searches, political persecution, and compulsory military conscription. In parallel, the Russian Federation is actively resettling its own citizens to the occupied Ukrainian territory of Crimea. This involves hundreds of thousands of people, which constitutes a direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and an act that qualifies as a war crime. This policy of «hybrid» deportation serves the same purpose as previous repressive campaigns of the Soviet time: to erase the Crimean Tatar presence in Crimea and create a false image of the «Russian» Crimea. On November 12, 2015 the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) of Ukraine officially recognized the deportation of the Crimean Tatars as an act of genocide and condemned the policy of the Soviet totalitarian regime in accordance with the provisions of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Parliaments of Latvia and Lithuania (2019), Canada (2022), as well as Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic (2024) adopted resolutions recognizing the Soviet regime's actions against the Crimean Tatar people as genocide. These resolutions also explicitly condemn the Russian Federation's ongoing repressive policies against Crimean Tatars in the context of the ongoing Russian occupation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Ukraine continues to actively engage with governments and international organizations calling for a comprehensive legal and moral assessment of the events of 1944 and classification of the Crimean Tatar tragedy as genocide. One of the priorities of the foreign policy of Ukraine is the de-occupation of Crimea and protection of the rights of Crimean Tatars. Only the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea - and the guarantee of the rights of its indigenous people - can ensure that Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and other citizens of Ukraine can live freely.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Crimean Tatars safeguard traditions in Ukraine in hope of return to homeland
By Anastasiia Malenko and Felix Hoske KYIV (Reuters) - With their ancestral homeland at the heart of future peace talks with Russia, Crimean Tatars are fighting to keep their language and practices alive in Ukraine, teaching some children who have never, and may never, set foot in Crimea. At a privately-run school just outside Kyiv, acting head teacher Olha Kycha says every child in her care carries "great importance" for Crimea's future - a new generation she believes will be crucial in the struggle to preserve Tatar identity. Muslim Tatars, who have endured a history of persecution and forced relocation, regard Crimea, the focus of centuries of conquest and power struggles, as their rightful homeland. More recently, Russia's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula in 2014 led to another wave of displacement, with many Crimean Tatars fleeing to mainland Ukraine. The territory's future has been pushed to the forefront of future peace talks between Ukraine and Russia after U.S. President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff set out a proposal that Russia should be handed U.S. legal recognition of its control of Crimea - an idea rejected by Kyiv. In response, Ukrainian and European officials proposed deferring detailed discussions about territory until after a ceasefire is concluded to end Russia's war, with no mention of recognising Russian control over any Ukrainian territory. Crimean Tatars, who numbered around a quarter of a million in Ukraine's last official census in 2001, can do little more than watch, wait and hope. "For us, every child who is here has huge value," Kycha said of her school, with its manicured gardens that she describes as "the only island, a piece of Crimea in the Kyiv region". "Although there are not so many of them, each of them is really of great importance in the future after the de-occupation of Crimea." The school's brochure says it "promotes the preservation of the traditions and customs of the Crimean Tatar people, and the study of Crimean Tatar poets and writers". Sitting in the school's well-equipped, underground gym waiting for another air raid alert to end, six-year-old Rukhiye says she doesn't like being told to stay indoors. But her dream isn't to play outside, she says, it is "to go to Crimea". HARSH TREATMENT Sitting in his mosque in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Ayder Rustemov, a 45-year-old mufti, recounts how he has lived around half his life in Crimea, returning with his family from deportation to Uzbekistan in 1988, only to flee after Russia's 2014 annexation. "We live by faith," said Rustemov, elected mufti of Crimean Tatars after Russia seized the territory. "If we recognise Crimea as Russian ... I don't even know what the consequences could be. Just unimaginable consequences," he told Reuters, suggesting it would set a dangerous precedent for other land with disputed claims. Sunni Muslims of Turkic origin, Crimean Tatars were deported en masse to distant parts of Central Asia by Soviet forces during World War Two for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. Crimea became part of Russia within the Soviet Union until 1954, when it was handed to Ukraine, also then a Soviet Republic, by Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian. Crimea's Tatars only began to return from exile in the 1980s. Most Crimean Tatars boycotted a referendum in 2014 which posed the question of rejoining Russia or restoring Crimea's status as part of Ukraine - Crimea's Moscow-backed leaders said 97% of voters were in favour of seceding in a vote condemned as illegal by Kyiv and the West. Since then, Crimean Tatars say they have been the target of Russian persecution: harassed, intimidated with threats and enforced disappearances. Thousands have fled, representatives say, although there is no official data. The Kremlin could not be reached for immediate comment. Russian officials deny any modern-era persecution and say Russia has supported all peoples living in Crimea after years of neglect under Kyiv's rule. "The parallels are obvious," Rustemov said, drawing a direct line to the actions of the Soviets to what Russia was doing now. "The goal of Russia has not changed, only the form has changed." QUESTION CLOSED? Russia says the question of Crimea's status has been closed "forever", but President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says Ukrainian sovereignty of the peninsula must be restored in efforts to end the war, triggered by Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. That stance has already put the Ukrainian leader at odds with Trump, who suggested on April 28 that Zelenskiy was ready to give up Crimea as the price of a peace deal with Russia. Zelenskiy has repeatedly said Crimea is Ukrainian territory and recognising the peninsula as part of Russia would violate Ukraine's constitution. For now, many Crimean Tatars can only hope for a return to their homeland. "Those (Crimean Tatars) who've stayed in Crimea probably have it harder," said Diliaver Saidakhmetov, 36, leaving a mosque in Kyiv. "Still, the majority of Crimean Tatars that live in Crimea continue dreaming about a free Crimea."
