One million people. This is the number of newcomers to Crimea after the occupation, according to Olga Kuryshko, the Acting Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Where do they come from, how do they affect the life of the peninsula, and what do Crimeans say about their new neighbors?

The first wave of colonizers was recorded immediately after the occupation of Crimea and was explained by the strengthening of the Russian power bloc. Betrayal of the oath did not help Crimean police officers, judges, and prosecutors earn the trust of the occupiers. Within the first few months after the annexation, they were generously diluted with Russian personnel. They also sent “reinforcements” for the authorities. Even then, local residents borrowed  words from the very own Moscow slang to call this category of migrants a  - “ponayekhavshiye” or simply “ponayekhi” both meaning newcomers.

“They could be immediately distinguished from the general mass by their gloomy and disdainful faces. They perceived Crimea as a place of uneducated and poor savages. And they were surprised that we don't have chickens and cows roaming around the city center. At the same time, from a professional point of view, these were ordinary officials who worked according to old methods that we had long ago abandoned,” says an employee of one of the departments of the Council of Ministers of Crimea, recalling the events of a decade ago.

Around the same time, Crimea was also flooded with Donbas refugees who believed in the “Russian world.” On the seashore, children made “DNR” inscriptions out of pebbles, and brand new Volkswagen Touaregs with Donetsk license plates arrived at taxi calls. The drivers of these “taxis” complained about the lack of promised social assistance and the need to earn money by driving.

Then the Russian military flocked to the peninsula en masse. Real estate prices for the newcomers, especially in cities and towns near military bases, skyrocketed. The replacement of the population of Sevastopol was particularly impressive.

“In the first year of the occupation, my daughter went to school. Back then, there were two or three children from somewhere in Russia in their class. Now it is definitely more than half of the class,” one of the city's residents assesses the scale of the disaster.

У In 2017-2019, construction workers arrived. Hundreds of Udmurts and Ossetians were brought to the peninsula to build the "Tavrida" highway and other facilities where officials were making money. At the same time, the visiting workers were not paid.

“We never lent money to any of them. They were constantly “cheating” them on their salaries, like the contractor went bankrupt. And a week later, they would bring in new workers,” recalls a worker in a village store near one of the large-scale construction sites.

At that time, not only construction workers were being cheated en masse, but also all sorts of businessmen who also flocked to the peninsula in search of the benefits of the “free economic zone” and the tenders of their dreams.

“I was taking a deposit for an apartment and saw that it was a typical outback businessman - shaved, with a haircut, in a tracksuit. A typical “Tagil” guy. He tells me that he was lucky with the tender and that his life here will be fabulous. And I'm thinking how many such stories I've heard before. And I guessed right: a week later he asks me to return at least half of the deposit, because he was cheated and has no money to go home,” the realtor from Simferopol recalls with a laugh.

But not everyone was offended and left. This was especially evident from the increase in rude drivers in tinted "Prioras" with Chechen license plates. The owners of these cars have become the main visitors to nightclubs and karaoke bars in Crimea, and a massive brawl at a Yevpatoria gas station with Crimean Tatars in September 2021 showed that the Chechen diaspora on the peninsula has begun to play a much more prominent role than it seemed.

In addition to “attractive business prospects,” the Russian authorities actively used social benefits for colonization. State-owned corporations opened corporate programs for their employees from the hinterland, which allegedly contributed to the “development” of the peninsula. Relocation payments, preferential loans, and other bonuses became standard policy for various Roscosmos and Gazproms. The largest projects were the “Zemsky Doctor” and “Zemsky Teacher” projects, which were designed to bring doctors and teachers from the Russian suburbs to rural areas of Crimea in exchange for a one-million ruble lump sum payment.

“Once we had very smart neurologists come to us, a husband and a wife. They were from somewhere in the Samara region. But they were not paid a million, and they went to Simferopol. They are working there now. And they lured some drunkard from Arkhangelsk to us, who prescribes iodine mesh for joint pain. He's not the only one, almost the whole hospital is like that,” complains a resident of one of the villages in Kirovsky district.

The full-scale invasion also had a significant impact on the change in the demographic composition of Crimea. Initially, the announcement of “partial mobilization” caused a noticeable migration of Crimean Tatars, who were primarily being taken to war. Human rights activists estimate that 10 percent of the indigenous people left the peninsula.

Instead, in the same year, 2022, collaborators from the Kherson region arrived. When the right bank of the region was liberated, supporters of the “Russian world” fled to Crimea. Russian propagandists claim that the population of the peninsula was then replenished with thirty thousand families loyal to the occupiers.

All these actions were recently assessed by the members of the European Parliament, who in a resolution dedicated to Crimea emphasized that the Russian occupation authorities “forcibly changed the demographic composition of Crimea on ethnic grounds in a neocolonial manner, which is a war crime under international law.”

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