(news report)

Annually on May 18, Ukraine commemorates the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crimean Tatar Genocide. In 1944 the Soviet Union conducted a special operation to deport all Crimean Tatars from the Crimean Peninsula. Stalin’s criminal order erased thousands of innocent lives.

Soviet authorities accused Crimean Tatar nation of collaborating en masse with Nazi Germany during World War II. At 4 am, the large-scale eviction of the Crimean Tatars from the territory of Crimea began. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) agents broke into houses and gave people 15 minutes to gather hand luggage, allowing them to take up to 500 kg of belongings per family. Then Crimean Tatars were driven to freight cars and sent to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

According to the National Movement of the Crimean Tatars, more than 420,000 people were deported. About half of them died either on the road or in the middle of nowhere…

After the deportation, the Crimean Tatar names of villages, settlements, districts and cities were renamed. In 1945, the Soviet authorities abolished the national-territorial autonomy of the Crimean Tatars — the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic — and in its place they created the Crimean Region. Later, new residents from Voronezh, Kursk, Orel and Belgorod regions (Russia) moved there en masse.

Only in 1989, the Crimean Tatars managed to return to their Homeland. They’ve preserved the memory of the genocide, and it’s passed down from generation to generation to this day.

Let me remind you that during the Russo-Ukrainian war more than 1 million Ukrainians were deported to remote areas of Russia, 200,000 of whom are children. Seems, the history repeats itself…