Several cars along a narrow mountain road near Alushta. Machine gunners in balaclavas. Traffic policemen are skillfully inspecting trunks and car interiors, and FSB officers are looking through the contents of other people's phones. Nothing unusual - another "anti-terrorist" exercise is happening on the southern coast. Residents of the occupied peninsula realized what was awaiting them almost immediately after the annexation. The Leninsky and Kirovsky district residents learned that the Russians were conducting Zaslin-2015 exercises only later. At first, their villages were surrounded by armed security forces without any warning or explanation, armored vehicles were deployed on the streets, and the homes of ordinary residents were searched. 

"Sandbags were set up on all roads leading to the village, and in some cases, machine guns and roadblocks were set up. On the streets of some settlements, people armed with assault rifles and dogs were checking documents. Traffic police and riot police officers at checkpoints stopped all passing cars and checked documents. According to some reports, the checks were selective and discriminatory: only documents were checked for people of Slavic appearance, while Crimean Tatars were sometimes accompanied to their homes and had their homes "inspected". Some houses were simply entered without witnesses and searched. A full-fledged search was conducted in 10 houses," - the report of the Contact Group on Human Rights in Crimea says. 

Since the year before last, similar exercises have been held in Crimea every month, and sometimes more often. At the same time, according to residents of the villages where the exercises were held recently, the approaches have not changed in ten years, and the Russian security forces have not increased their respect for the law. People are still subjected to scrutiny without reason, businesses are blocked, and the inviolability of private property is deeply disregarded. The changes have only affected the technological aspect - the latest developments have been used for "anti-terrorist" exercises. 

"From six in the morning, there was no mobile communication or Internet. They jammed both wired and mobile phones. I went outside, and I heard a buzz. Drones were flying along every street, patrolling. Someone later said that they have heat sensors on them, so that no one could pretend that they are not at home," says one of the residents of the Chornomorsk district, where such exercises were held at the end of last year. 

Another witness of the "anti-terrorism" noted the considerable resources that the occupiers use to conduct such events. "They stopped me. They checked my car. They checked the documents against some database, then said to unlock the phone. I didn't risk downloading my license, so I unlocked it. They took it somewhere and said they would connect it to the machine. They returned it in about 20 minutes and, as I understood it, they had downloaded all the data from it to their own device. And I have more than two hundred gigabytes of memory there. They also took the flash drive from the dashboard to copy it. And I wonder how big a disk they must have to hold the information for one day of such exercises. Because at least three more phones were taken after me, and I think they were draining data from them all day," a resident of the Saki district shares his observations with CEMAAT. 

Crimeans are especially outraged by the use of weapons during the exercises. "There were several lines of fire, somewhere nearby. They scared my child and me too. They found a place to practice shooting, assholes. I didn't even know it was a drill. And anyway, what is this shooting under the windows of houses? Is there nowhere else?" - outraged a resident of the South Bank, where the last series of trainings took place.

Crimean human rights activists say that the real purpose of such exercises is not to counter terrorists, but to work out the coordination to ensure terror of the local population. "We have seen roadblocks, encircling, jammers, drones and blank firing more than once during mass searches and arrests of Crimean Muslims. Then something similar happened during Ukrainian protests in occupied Kherson. They are not training to fight any terrorists, but civilians of the occupied territories," say experts of the human rights initiative Irade.

Human rights activists are convinced that the methods developed during such exercises were useful to the Russian occupiers during the mobilization on the peninsula in September-October 2022. "We took a village. Early in the morning, they blocked all the roads - no one was allowed in or out. The Russian Guard soldiers raided the village, in some cases breaking into houses. They simply took away phones and documents, and men were packed into buses and taken to military commissariats," human rights activists describe the methodology.

Crimean residents fear that the recent increase in drills may indicate the preparation of a new wave of mobilization. "They have a scenario where a sabotage group has infiltrated and is being searched for in the village. But what kind of saboteurs would go to Luchyste? To blow up the Valley of Ghosts? But it is very convenient to practice first to find out where it is most convenient to block the roads, where to round up people for dispatch, where the locals can hide," one of the residents of Alushta thinks.

Local human rights activists are in solidarity with this opinion. Neither counter-sabotage nor anti-terrorist activities require such detailed elaboration on a site-by-site basis. But for effective support of mass repressive measures, this is just the right format. Moreover, the Russian security forces are much more trained in the issue of pressuring unarmed civilians than in real counterterrorism. Last year's terrorist attack in the Crocus Hall near Moscow, which killed hundreds of people, is a vivid confirmation of this.