On 18 May 2021, Ukraine marks the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Crimean Tatar Genocide and honours the memory of more than two hundred thousand innocent victims of the Stalin’s regime. In 1944, these people were forcibly thrown into freight trains and deported to remote regions of Central Asia and Siberia.

The deportation of 1944 was a deliberate action by the inhuman communist regime of the USSR to eliminate one of the indigenous peoples of Crimea. According to various estimates, in the first years of expulsion, more than 46% of the evicted Crimean Tatars died as a result of hunger, mass diseases, physical abuse and hard labour at special settlements. In these places the Crimean Tatars were held under severe curfew conditions and used for heavy exhausting work in mines, logging, and construction of irrigation canals. Despite numerous losses over the next decades, the Crimean Tatars continued their political struggle for the right to return to their homeland.

70 years after the deportation, Russia resumed repressions against the Crimean Tatar people, having occupied Crimea in 2014. Systemic political persecution, physical and psychological pressure, displacement of independent media, oppression on religious grounds, deprivation of property and linguistic rights – all this forced more than 48,000 Ukrainian citizens, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatars, to leave the occupied peninsula. On 29 September 2016, the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the decision to ban the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people recognizing it as an extremist organization.

Hundreds of Ukrainian citizens, in particular Crimean Tatars, became victims of political repression on criminal cases fabricated by the Russian invaders. Dozens are being illegally detained on politically motivated charges in Crimea and on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Ukraine’s position on the protection of European democratic values, human rights and freedoms remains unchanged and unwavering. Ukraine protects the rights of the Crimean Tatar people in the same way as the rights of all indigenous peoples living on the Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine urges the international community to condemn this crime of the totalitarian communist regime and to recognize the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from Crimea in 1944 as genocide of the Crimean Tatar people.

We also call on the entire civilized world to participate in the Crimean Platform and jointly resolve the pressing political, security, legal, economic and humanitarian problems caused by the occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation.