Photo: Frank Peter Wilde

Today my country celebrates an independence day, some say it’s Ukraine’s 33rd birthday. However, everyone knows that Ukraine is way older than that. 

Ukraine’s history is very rich and diverse, but the whole world is getting to know it only now, because of the Great War and because Russia kept stealing and embezzling Ukrainian history for centuries.

33 years isn’t my country’s age. It’s a period of time that Ukraine is no longer a part of the Soviet “Brotherhood of Nations” which in fact was a prison for nations. 

And unfortunately, my country has been suffering from this “brotherhood” all the years after the independence was proclaimed.

But for the last two and a half years it’s been not simply suffering, it’s been bleeding quite literally.

That’s the price Russia wants us to pay for wanting a very simple thing, something that is self-understood in the civilized world. Something that Russia has never possessed itself. This simple thing is freedom. 

Russians keep bragging that there’s no such a holiday as an Independence Day in their country cause they were neither colonized nor dependent on any other country, empire, union, etc. But were they ever free? 

The answer is no. And the vast majority of them don’t even want to be free, they admire dictators and they need an iron fist to rule them. 

They see it as the only way to exist and they want to spread their “Russian world” everywhere. 

And when they can’t, they start to kill and destroy and bring their “Russian world” forcefully to the places they weren’t welcomed to.

The whole world has been witnessing this in Ukraine for the last two and a half years. But it’s been centuries since Russia has been trying its best to suppress and “russify” Ukraine with Crimea being its favorite bit.

For centuries Russia has been trying to get rid of the Indigenous peoples of Crimea, not only Crimean Tatars but Karaites (or Karaims) and Krymchaks, too.

In 2014 the whole world witnessed how Russia annexed my homeland Crimea, and the international community didn’t do much for the sake of not escalating the situation. Today we are dealing with the consequences of such silence. 

However, now it is all in our hands to change the future and make Russia pay. 

This evening, one of our initiatives is to gather signatures for the petition we submitted to the Bundestag to recognize the Deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 as a genocide. 

We are going to hand out the petition on paper and will be very thankful if you sign it.

The more ties we build to Crimea the more we show that it doesn’t belong to Russia. 

Crimean Tatars are indigenous people not only to Crimea, but to the whole Ukraine and we, Crimean Tatars are part of Ukraine and see our future only in Ukraine. 

Because Crimea is Ukraine!

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