A month ago, many articles appeared to remind the Western public of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This wave of articles overshadowed a second important date of Russia’s war of aggression: the 26th of February 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, beginning with the occupation of Crimea. However, Russia did not declare war. Given Russia’s aim of destroying the very concept of truth, that is perhaps not surprising. What was more surprising was that it worked. Countless Western commentators did not call the invasion an invasion, but the „Ukraine crisis“. They not only obscured the fact that an illegal invasion had occurred, but even made the actor responsible for the so-called „crisis“ invisible.
There were of course, people who recognized what was happening. Among the most vocal ones were the Crimean Tatars, who were also at the forefront of resisting the Russian occupation of their homeland. They gathered with the flags of Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars, and the flags of the European Union in front of the parliament in Simferopol and tried to prevent the catastrophe. They understood very well what the Russian takeover of their homeland would mean for democracy and freedom, but especially for their communities. They turned out to be right. Crimean Tatars were specifically targeted by the occupying forces up until this day. Last May, to commemorate the anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, I was on a panel in Berlin with Elvis Çolpuh and the artist Aider Khatipov, two men who had to flee their homeland in 2022 and are now advocating for Crimea and Ukraine. At the beginning of the discussion, they both apologized (unnecessarily) for their German language skills, saying that they were actually not good enough for a public panel discussion, but that they could not afford to remain silent. Both told the stories of their parents and grandparents whose lives were marked by the genocidal deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944. In May 1944, agents of the Soviet Secret Service knocked at the door of Crimean Tatar families, telling them that they had a few hours to pack their belongings, then forced them into cattle wagons and deported them to Central Asia. Many did not survive the journey, and many others perished in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Crimean Tatars have a lot of experience with Russian colonial violence, which is why they fervently supported Ukraine’s independence in 1991. When the Russian troops invaded Crimea in 2014, the same patterns repeated themselves. Old men and women who had survived the deportation of 1944 and all those whose lives had been shaped by it were experiencing the same horror yet again.
The youngest Ukrainian civilian prisoner of Russia today is also from a Crimean Tatar family for whom I am personally advocating on the invitation of the Crimea Platform. His name is Appaz Kurtament, and he was abducted by Russian occupational forces when visiting his home in Kherson in the summer of 2022 (my colleague Martin Kisly told me that some Crimean Tatars settled in Kherson in Soviet times to at least be closer to their ancestral home, since even after their official rehabilitation in 1967, Crimean Tatars were not permitted to return to Crimea). In a sham trial, Appaz was sentenced to 7 years in a penal colony in Russia. He is currently being held in Pskov region. Appaz is one of many political prisoners of Russia. His story is a stark reminder of what the Russian occupation of Ukraine means: the loss of basic human rights, the loss of freedom, the loss of dignity, lawlessness, and genocidal violence. Recently, German podcaster Ole Nymoen made fun of people who think that living in a dictatorship like Russia is a bad thing. Do they think that you can’t visit your friends, can’t go to nightclubs, can’t go out to have drinks? Appaz can’t do any of those things. Russia has robbed him of his freedom. This is what dictatorships do. This is what Ukraine is fighting against.
Appaz is one of many civilian prisoners being illegally detained in Russia. Russia wants the West to forget them. Give hope to a prisoner and show them that they are not forgotten by writing a letter and sharing their stories. You can find the instructions in this link. Thank you.
Franziska Davies is assistant professor of Eastern and Central Eastern European History at the History Department of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her resarch focuses on the modern history of Ukraine, Poland and Russia.
This article first appeared on After empire: Reconfiguring Eastern Europe.
More content from this blog
- Left Renewal Blog Seeking Co-editors
- How “Remigration” Traveled from European Neo-Nazis to the White House, by GPAHE – 21 January 2026
- What Are Palestinian Citizens of Israel Voting For? Sally Abed and Jess Bricker in Conversation – 11 December 2025
- Marx Was No Friend of Moscow, by Rasmus Fleischer – 5 March 2026
- Iran between Repression, Co-optation, and War: Three Waves of Counterrevolution, by Somayeh Rostampour – 19 March 2026
- Rojava, Kurdish Autonomy & Self-Determination, and the Hard Problem of Simple Demographics: An Essay of Maps, by Michael Karadjis – 4 February 2026