Rustem Virati. For one day, the news of the death of a 60-year-old Crimean Tatar filled the news feeds of Ukrainian media. Against the backdrop of thousands of fallen defenders and civilian victims of Russian attacks on peaceful towns and villages in Ukraine, the death of a civilian political prisoner looks like something far away. Something like the Syrian or Vietnam wars.

Within a single day, journalists used at least four different variants of the tortured man's surname: Versati, Verasti, Viratti, Verati. Because no one had two or more reliable sources to check, or at least one from the official registry.

For one day, inaccuracies in his rare Crimeantatar surname were edited. In the end, everyone agreed to use the version of Virati provided by the Crimeantatar Resource Center in Kyiv, which had the most extensive information about the deceased resident of Henichesk.

This is not because the journalists took the standard of accuracy of information transmission lightly. The truth is that Rustem Virati had been an unknown prisoner for two years in detention. It was his family wantedwish -  they believed in Rustem's rescue to the last and lived with the horror that the information campaigns and activity of Ukrainian journalists would complicate the situation of the political prisoner and stir up the occupiers to further repressions against him or his family.

Residents of the newly occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are being “educated” by Russian terror with extraordinary savagery, which we can only guess at after what we saw in Bucha, Irpen and Izium. The world will probably never know the whole truth about Russian war crimes in southern Ukraine, at least as long as these territories remain under occupation, as was the case with the genocide of the inhabitants of the Azerbaijani city of Khojaly in early 1992, which Baku liberated only 30 years later.

The Crimeantatar public media CEMAAT (in 2022 our website was called UA South) published dozens of articles about the missing Ukrainians of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the first 5 months of the occupation. Each article was a separate story and focused on only one person, so that war crimes would not turn into statistics. Our previous experience allowed us to quickly find relatives of the disappeared who were not yet paralyzed by fear of the new reality. Ukrainians were used to speaking out about injustice and did not know that the Russian occupier was the most brutal torturer in world history.

However, very quickly this openness began to disappear, and in September 2022, a few months before the liberation of Kherson, it became impossible to keep in touch with those who did not know you personally. People rejoiced that at least a crippled relative had been returned to them. People chose silence.

Tortured, raped, maimed and unknown. Their relatives and friends are no longer waiting for a humane trial of the torturers. Because the choice for those who have been under instant occupation since February 24, 2022, consisted of two options: to add to the list of those tortured or to remain silent...

It is likely that this silence will be lifelong, and the Azerbaijani 30th anniversary of waiting will seem like a short pause.

The leader of the world, who for almost the entire last century called himself the greatest defender of human rights, changed his face on January 20, 2025. And over the next month, it changed the concepts of honor, dignity, and intellectual capacity.  The world's leader saw the desire for peace in the eyes of the executioner-in-chief.

Since 1977, the US State Department has been publishing a multi-page document on human rights violations around the world. Often, even a single political imprisonment or mysterious death of a person could cause an American reaction to the country in which it occurred. Getting into the US State Department's report could save the life of a person whom the repressive machine of the world's largest dictatorships did not have time to kill behind bars. The leader of the world could not save everyone, but for almost 50 years he made it clear that he was watching everyone.

The report for the past year will appear soon - traditionally, it is published in March or April. But will we ever see the report for the current year? It's not a certainty. Because from now on, a thousand or even a million people killed is no longer an obstacle to seeing peace in the eyes of a murderer.

Rustem Virati became the third Ukrainian political prisoner killed by Russians behind bars. The first was Konstantin Shiring.

His death became known on February 8, 2023. The Ukrainian was sentenced to 12 years for spying for Ukraine. Two days later, on February 10, 2023, the second political prisoner, Dzhemil Gafarov, convicted in the Hizb ut-Tahrir case, died.

He was detained back in 2019 and put to death without a “court order”.

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