Crimea remains Ukrainian as long as Crimean Tatars live there

Among the many questions he asked me was one about the return of occupied Crimea and parts of southern Ukraine.

I honestly told him that I don't know how to return the south, but I feel more at ease about Crimea.

Because as long as the indigenous people of Ukraine — the Crimean Tatars — live there and have the opportunity to preserve their identity, Crimea is not lost.

There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that the Crimean Tatar people found ways to survive in deportation, occupation, and isolation without losing themselves and their memory.

And in this memory, they aspire to be a free, democratic people. They do not succumb to assimilation in the way that Russia does with other nations it has occupied.

Because they have a way to free Ukraine, and it is here, among us, that the promise of a different future for the Crimean Tatar people lives. It lives and should live. At the same time, the Crimean Tatars in Crimea are a promise that Russian control cannot fully grasp and crush everything on the peninsula to fit its agenda.

Crimea continues to preserve its memory and internal complexity.

This complexity is very important for a people like ours. It is our vaccination against falling into an ethnic titular concept, against resentment on ethnic grounds, against the fate of Hungary after the war.

Crimean Tatars, Jews, Greeks, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Belarusians, and even Russians — though the number of people who identify as Russian decreasing every year — show us that we in Ukraine are carriers of a civic identity, and it is capable of being inclusive.

Therefore, it is important for us to see and honor the tragedies of those who share the fate of our common civic identity.

And to recognize the shared pain.

Crimean Tatars, as carriers of the memory of the terrible events of the deportation, clearly recognize Russian occupation as another attempt to destroy their people.

Every new monument to Stalin in Russia only strengthens this recognition.

Crimea is truly Ukrainian as long as there is a large part of the Ukrainian civic nation — Crimean Tatars — living there with a strong national identity.

Their experience of returning to their homeland in Crimea will be important for Ukraine after the war.

The terrible tragedy of deportation is already important because it demonstrates the continuity of the crime that Russia has committed.

Last year, we studied Ukrainians' attitudes toward Crimean Tatars, including its cognitive aspects.

Many young Ukrainians talked about Crimean Tatars as those sent to Siberia along with Ukrainians.

This non-separation of the experience, as a fact of memory, is already emerging, and it speaks volumes about all of us.

We remember the tragedy of deportation and remember its innocent victims. Then and now, because it continues.

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About the author: Olha Dukhnych, social psychologist

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