In marking Captive Nations Week 2018, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation issued a report noting that “The status of the captive nations is more dire than it was in 2017.” Included on the VOC Foundation’s list were two occupied areas: Crimea and the Donbas. Below are the sections from the report related to these two Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia.
Occupied Ukraine: Crimea
This year, the pattern of repression in Russian-occupied Crimea has deepened and has been systematized. The occupation forces perpetuate a false narrative that ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim Crimean Tatars are “terrorists” and “extremists.” Pursuant to this, homes and mosques have been raided on the pretext of antiterrorism. Twenty-eight Crimean Tatars have been arrested for allegedly conspiring with an Islamist organization known as “Hizb ut-Tahrir.” Four have been convicted in the past year. Tatar community leaders in Crimea and living in exile abroad fear that renewed ethnic cleansing, of the type carried out by Joseph Stalin, is in the offing.
Two important Tatar activists, Ilmi Umerov and Akhtem Chiygoz, were both convicted in Russian courts in September 2017: Umerov for “separatism” and Chiygoz for allegedly instigating civil disturbances. Both men were arrested in the aftermath of the Crimean invasion, and Umerov was in particularly poor health. In October, thanks to a deal brokered by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the two Tatar leaders were allowed to leave the peninsula and go into exile. Both promised to return to their embattled homeland.
Ethnic Ukrainian residents of Crimea are not exempt from persecution. Three of Russia’s highest-profile political prisoners – Oleh Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko and Volodymyr Balukh – are Ukrainian Crimeans. Sentsov is a filmmaker and a participant in the 2014 Auto-Maidan; Kolchenko is a trade unionist and vocal anti-fascist who was, ironically, falsely accused of being part of a far right wing political group; Balukh is a farmer who made himself nettlesome to the occupation authorities by hanging a Ukrainian flag from his roof. Crimean Tatar groups around the world and their allies have been unanimous in their calls for the release of these three (and other Crimean political prisoners held by Putin), especially in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup.
Occupied Ukraine: Donbas
The Donbas region of Ukraine, now occupied by Russian forces and the puppet regimes of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” has remained the site of an essentially frozen conflict throughout the past year. In October 2017, defense analysts reported that more than 11,000 Russian troops were stationed in the territory, along with tanks, artillery and armored vehicles. Ceasefire violations along the frontlines (for which each side blames the other) have resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
As in Crimea, Russian forces in the Donbas are increasingly engaged in paranoid and discriminatory religious persecution of both Muslims and Ukrainian Greek-Catholics in an effort to root out “extremists” and pro-Ukraine sympathizers. The Russian government’s ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses has also been extended to the puppet state in Luhansk as well.
An international investigation into the 2014 shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over the Donbas region is ongoing. All evidence has conclusively pointed towards the culpability of the Russian military or its “separatist” proxies – a finding supported by airline industry safety groups, human rights groups and European governments. The Joint Investigative Team – a specialized task force including law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Malaysia, Belgium, Ukraine and Australia – reported that MH17 was downed by a surface-to-air missile that only Russian forces in the theater had access to at the time. Furthermore, in March 2018, Ukrainian intelligence named seven prime suspects in the shootdown, a list which included high-ranking Russian military officers involved the covert war in Donbas.