80 years ago, on 18 May 1944, by the decision of the USSR leadership, the Crimean Tatar people were subjected to forced and total deportation from their historic homeland, Crimea, and exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union.
The inhumane conditions of the curfew regime that lasted from 1944 to 1956 – famine, epidemics, repression and imprisonment in special settlements – became a prerequisite for the mass deaths of Crimean Tatars, most of whom were elderly people, women and children. According to the National Movement of the Crimean Tatars, which conducted a census of the Crimean Tatar people in the mid-1960s, a total of 238,500 people were expelled from Crimea, and the number of murdered in the first years was equal to 46.2% of all those deported.
Unfortunately, the world did not condemn this terrible crime in a timely manner. And impunity gave rise to a new tragedy. Now the Russian Federation is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Daily mass killings, abductions, and enforced displacement of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to the territory of the Russian Federation are the present-day realities. It is currently known that more than 1.9 million Ukrainian citizens have been relocated to the territory of the Russian Federation. And more than 14 million of Ukrainians have gone abroad.
For years, the Russian authorities have been trying to destroy Ukraine and its people:
– The Holodomor of 1921-1923, 1932-1933, 1946-1947
– Deportation of the Crimean Tatar people in 1944
– Occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014
– Full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022