By Adam Aydin | 2025-06-10

PRAGUE -- Forced from their homeland once before, Crimean Tatars are again packing their lives into emergency suitcases, preparing to flee a peninsula where repression has returned.

More than 80 years after Joseph Stalin's mass deportations, Crimean Tatars still face ethnic discrimination, school closures and bans on their culture and language. The persecution has intensified since Russia's 2014 annexation of the peninsula, according to Erfan Kudusov, a Crimean Tatar activist.

Since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many Crimean Tatars fear conditions will worsen.

"The Crimean Tatars who remain [in Crimea] mostly associate only with each other or with people they trust, those who share their loyalty to Ukraine," Kudusov told Kontur.

Privately, some Crimean Tatars are preparing to abandon or even destroy their houses to keep them out of Russian hands.

A new wave of tyranny

Russian authorities have forced an exodus of Crimean Tatars and other ethnic groups from the peninsula, Mustafa Dzhemilev, longtime Crimean Tatar leader and member of Ukraine's parliament, confirmed to Kontur.

"This is a big tragedy. Our people fought for many years to return to our homeland, but now ... they are again forced to leave it," Dzhemilev, 81, said.

"A great many of them started leaving after mobilization was announced in fall 2022. [They] did not want to be sent to fight against their own country," Dzhemilev said, referring to the Kremlin's call-up of 300,000 men for the invasion of Ukraine.

Before the invasion, most Crimean Tatars who opposed Russian rule moved to mainland Ukraine.

Now they are increasingly emigrating to countries like Türkiye, Georgia and Kazakhstan, Dzhemilev said.

Some men have headed to Germany, Ireland and the United States to avoid the draft, Kudusov added.

Numbers differ on the size of the post-2014 exodus from the peninsula.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, about 50,000 Crimean Tatars, roughly one-fifth of that group, have left, including more than 10,000 after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, said Dzhemilev.

Human rights activists have a much higher estimate of at least 100,000 departures from Crimea to mainland Ukraine in that period.

The exact number who have fled Crimea or emigrated since 2022 remains unclear.

Punished for loyalty to Ukraine

Rinat, whose name was changed for security reasons, is one of the legions who left Crimea after Russia's full-scale invasion. Now living in a European country, he calls the crackdown on Crimean Tatars "punitive measures."

"Crimean Tatars opposed the annexation of Crimea. For disagreeing with the new authorities, Crimean Tatars were persecuted and imprisoned en masse. Hundreds are now in Russian prisons in other regions," he told Kontur.

The mass arrests were retaliation for the Crimean Tatars' opposition to the annexation and their boycott of a March 16, 2014, referendum, said Gayana Yüksel, a member of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis (Assembly).

The referendum, held under Russian coercion, resulted in supposed approval of the annexation of Crimea.

"On February 26 [2014], the day before Crimea was seized, we organized the biggest demonstration against the occupation with the involvement of Crimean Tatars and pro-Ukraine activists," Yüksel told Kontur.

The Kremlin branded the Mejlis an extremist organization. Crimean Tatars faced arrests, kidnappings and fabricated criminal cases. Prosecutors accused many of them of involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group banned in Russia. Evidence often relied on secret witnesses and defendants' Muslim identity, Yüksel said.

Seiran Saliyev, 39, was one of those targeted. He openly denounced Russian authorities during Friday prayers at the Bakhchysarai mosque, speaking out about police searches of Tatar houses.

Saliyev was later accused of ties to Hizb ut-Tahrir

In 2020, a Russian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, which another court reduced by one year in 2021. He denies the charges. Now, he is imprisoned in Tula province, about 1,500km from Crimea. Other Tatars accused of similar ties are held in prisons far from home.

In Silent Deportation, a documentary by RFE/RL, Saliyev's wife, Mumine, called the anti-Crimean Tatar campaign "classic political repression," saying hundreds have been jailed on political charges and sent to Russian prisons and labor camps, while others have fled conscription. She described the persecution of Tatars as "invisible deportation" using hybrid methods.

Demographic engineering

Meanwhile, about 1 million Russian citizens have resettled in Crimea over the past 11 years, more than one-third of the peninsula's population, demographers say.

Yüksel calls that influx a forcible demographic shift and a war crime.

"This is about the complete assimilation of Crimean Tatars, the destruction of national identity and ban on participation in political life and representative bodies," she said.

Feeling stifled, young residents are leaving, already impacting Crimean Tatar culture and language. Russification is accelerating, say rights activists.

"If Russia could physically deport everyone like in 1944, it would. But now it is done differently: people are pushed out through fear and the impossibility of living on their native land," said Yüksel.

A future tied to Ukraine

On May 18, Ukraine and other countries honored the victims of the 1944 expulsion of Crimean Tatars. Eighty-one years ago, Soviet authorities accused Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and exiled more than 200,000 people to Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan. Up to 40,000 died within six months of arriving, some scholars estimate.

This year, authorities barred Crimean Tatars in Russian-occupied Crimea from publicly commemorating the anniversary.

"People are allowed to lay flowers at monuments but only in the presence of occupation authorities. Since no self-respecting Crimean Tatar would cooperate with the occupiers, there were practically no commemorations," Dzhemilev said.

Crimea's population continues to shrink as repression, military mobilization of men and forced departures drive thousands, especially Crimean Tatars, from their homeland.

"The overwhelming majority of Crimean Tatars are waiting for Ukraine's return because everyone understands that the survival of our people, our culture, our language and our history is possible only in a democratic, independent Ukraine," said Kudusov. "We're waiting for Ukraine's victory."