Rustem Useinov will spend tonight in his old car. The occupiers took the seventy-year-old Crimean Tatar's only home, a construction trailer, from his plot on the Crimean coast by truck this morning. Rustem-aga returned to his native Ay-Serez in the 2000s, and after the Soviet wanderings, he thought that his old age would be peaceful on the land of his ancestors.

Four years ago, the occupiers destroyed the pensioner's house, which he had built before the occupation but did not have time to legalize. In 2014, the Russians called the Crimean settlements squatting, and in 2021, they bulldozed all Crimean Tatar houses. The houses were destroyed by the decision of the occupation court. This time, they did not even use pocket courts to grab the last property of the indigenous Crimean resident.

Rustem-aga did not resist. He did not even take the medicine from the trailer.

- If I had taken anything, it would have been an acceptance of their violence. I do not acknowledge them. Let them take everything they can take...

Rustem-aga did not leave his land even when one Russian bulldozed his house with his own hands in front of him, and another took the remains of the Crimean's life to the dump in a truck. He hasn't left this land since.

- Thanks to my maternal grandmother, I know my family tree back to the 1600s. This is my land and all my ancestors' land. I will stay here - in a tent or in the open air. As long as I have a car. This is where our ancient Ay-Serez was. Because of Russian shelling from the sea, the inhabitants of Ay-Serez left the local coast and hid from the rapists in the mountains. For the past 250 years, Ay-Serez (renamed Mezhdurechye by Stalin after 1945) has been known as a mountain village, but that is a new one. Our real land is here, on the slopes by the sea.

There are a few wooden pallets left on the plot under the mountain, on which Rustem-aga wants to set up a tent, but he has not yet found an acceptable one in the surrounding shops.

- But somehow it will be done. We can wait out the cold and bad weather in the car. My friends Haraman and Khokhla are next to me...

Kharaman and Khokhla are two yard dogs that do not leave the man and accompany him along the mountain slopes of the Sudak coast.

‍- Recently, he was in the hospital for two months. Then the dogs were rescued by a local djemaat (Crimean Tatar community - Ed.), but some bad people poisoned the garden. I planted a bunch of trees here. Very fruitful varieties. They killed the trees with chemicals, but at least they didn't touch the dogs.

Rustem Useinov moved to Crimea as a young man with his parents in the late 1960s. At that time, Crimean Tatars were not registered on the peninsula, and often the history of the indigenous people ended with a police raid and deportation with their belongings outside the peninsula - to Kherson or Krasnodar region. Rustem-aga waited out the repressions by settling in a steppe village on the Kerch Peninsula. We already talked about this in 2022, when Rustem Useinov was one of the protagonists of the Crimean Media Platform's film Crimea.Isolation.

- Many Kerch villages are now devastated. The climate there is harsh, like a desert. Only the Kerch Nogai could cope with such nature, and the Russians exterminated them as good warriors. That's why no one has settled in these villages over the past 200 years, but the police did not bother them much in Soviet times, because there was no one to live and work there anyway.

In independent Ukraine, it became a little easier, and Rustem-aga, along with other descendants of the Ay-Serez people, decided to return to the land of their ancestors.

- We are a small people, but everyone knows their origins very well. We have no people without clan or tribe. There hasn't been an Ay-Serez here for 250 years, but all people of Ay-Serez  remember the three cemeteries that are nearby. The communists built a boarding house "Sun Stone" on the bones of our grandmothers. One cemetery is Muslim, and the other two are Catholic and Orthodox. Ay-Serez residents still say “Rum ve Genevez dedelerimizin mezari” (these are the graves of our Roman (Greek) and Genoese grandfathers - Ed.). I will not leave their bones unattended.

This is his first night in the car, and it may not be his last, but there is no sadness in his voice. He constantly says “şükür” (thank you, God) and says goodbye, because it's time to feed Kharaman (Crimean Tatar for ‘hero’ - Ed.) and Khokhla (Crimean Tatar for “doll” - Ed.). And get some sleep, because tomorrow they have to look for a tent again.