A Crimean Tatar-led underground movement is already active behind Russian lines and hundreds of young Tatar men are ready to take up arms to liberate the occupied peninsula, a veteran community leader has said.
Mustafa Dzemilev, widely seen as the godfather of the Crimean Tatar rights movement, pointed to operations by the Atesh guerrilla group, comprising Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians, in Crimea and other occupied Ukrainian regions.
Atesh, which means “fire” in Crimean Tatar, was created in September last year, primarily to carry out acts of sabotage from within the ranks of the Russian army. It claims more than 4,000 Russian soldiers have already enrolled in an online course on how to “survive the war” by wrecking their own equipment.
There is no evidence linking the group to the latest attack on the Kerch Bridge, early on Monday morning, but the group has claimed a string of smaller-scale attacks, blowing up Russian checkpoints, assassinating Russian officers, setting fire to barracks and feeding sensitive information to Ukrainian intelligence. It recently accused Russian sappers of laying mines in the Krymskyi Titan chemical works in Armiansk, northern Crimea. An explosion there could spread an ammonia cloud across the land bridge between the peninsula and mainland Ukraine.
“Atesh is very deep underground,” Dzhemilev, 79, told the Guardian in an interview in Kyiv. “There was not a single arrest among Atesh members, but they are working inside Crimea territory blowing up targets.”
Dzemilev said the 300,000-strong Crimean Tatar community had been the focus of resistance to Russian occupation since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea, not least because of its experience under Moscow’s rule.
The Crimean Tatars are the Turkic-speaking native people of Crimea, absorbed by the Mongol Golden Horde in the 13th century. They adopted Islam and broke away as the powerful Crimean Khanate in the 15th century. After Russian annexation in 1783, the process of persecution and expulsion began under imperial rule, and it was continued under the Soviet Union.
In 1944, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population, mostly to Uzbekistan, including Dzemilev’s family, when he was six months old. As a human rights activist, he spent years under surveillance and in penal colonies. He is no longer the chairman of the Crimean Tatar assembly, the Mejlis, but remains a member of parliament and the pre-eminent elder of the community.
On 12 March 2014, two weeks after Russian soldiers wearing no insignia seized strategic points in Crimea and four days before a “referendum” was held on the peninsula to endorse its “independence”, Vladimir Putin spoke to Dzemilev by phone.
“He told me he saw Crimean Tatars as pacifists and he hoped there would be no violence,” Dzemilev recalled of the 45-minute conversation. “I told him, wait a minute, it’s non-violence when you are defending your civil rights in your own country. But when an enemy’s boot steps on your land, that’s a completely different matter.”
Dzhemilev said Crimean Tatars are bearing the brunt of the Russian occupation. They account for 13% of the peninsula’s population, but he said 85% of political arrests and illegal searches were targeted against them. Crimean Tatar activists have disproportionately been the victims of kidnapping and disappearances. Dzemilev said 49 activists were missing and only eight of their bodies had been found so far. Political leaders and dozens of activists have been jailed.
Despite the level of control and persecution, Dzemilev said if Crimean Tatars felt liberation was close, the ranks of the partisans would grow significantly. “At the current moment, around 1,000 young men are ready to take up arms as soon as the Ukrainian army arrives, if they are able to get the weapons,” he said.
Refat Chubarov, the current Mejlis chairman, warned against outside powers seeking to negotiate the future of Crimea without the participation of its Indigenous people.
“We don’t want another Yalta,” Chubarov told the Guardian, referring to the 1945 meeting in the Crimean summer resort, where Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill accepted Joseph Stalin’s assurances that democratic elections would be allowed in eastern European countries.
Chubarov said there were “thousands” of Crimean Tatars ready to fight any attempt to leave their homeland under prolonged Russian occupation.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive is under way and Kyiv’s forces are making territorial gains, but are still far from the formidable fortifications Russian forces have built along the road to Crimea. The region’s liberation does not appear imminent, and even if Ukraine suddenly makes a breakthrough and reached Crimea, some of Kyiv’s backers in Washington and a few European capitals are nervous at the prospect of Russian occupation forces being driven out, lest it makes Putin desperate enough to use a nuclear bomb or some other weapon of mass destruction.
As with Russian volunteers fighting with Ukrainian support on Russian territory, the military role of the Crimean Tatars as a highly motivated partisan force would be a way to put Moscow under additional pressure without alarming allies.
“The Crimean Tatars are of extreme importance in the future liberation of Crimea, from the ideological, political and other points of view,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said. “They are very active and effective in terms of the preparation for the future liberation of Crimea. Dzemilev and Chubarov are actively cooperating with the presidential office and Ukrainian central government in those preparations.
“Crimean Tatars are serving in the armed services of Ukraine and take an active role in partisan operations in Crimea. There is quite a wide network within Crimea right now, that is very useful. Certain incidents are happening there that are proof of that.”
After liberation, Crimean Tatars will be seeking greater recognition, including a constitutional change that would make Crimea a “national republic” in which they, as the Indigenous people, would have special status. Dzemilev said the creation of such a republic would be irrespective of whatever role his community plays in liberation.
On that score, however, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s government has made no specific assurances.
“In wartime it is forbidden to change the constitution,” Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar activist who currently serves as the president’s permanent representative to Crimea, said in an interview in Kyiv. “There is a lot of talk about the status of Crimea after liberation, but right now there is no final decision. Right now, this question is on hold.”
