Tråden om Krimhalvön

Those responsible for the blackout will be served with official compensation claims, she added.

Vladimir Putin will visit Crimea on Friday to check the progress in the construction of the Kerch Strait bridge.

Putin will also hold a meeting on social and economic development of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.

What is really going on currently in the Crimea?

Refat Dedarov: In Crimea, life is getting better.

I: Did Crimean Tatars who are currently living in the peninsula travel to Ankara?

RD: Yes, we went; maybe a dozen people. But in their statements, I did not hear any attack on Russia or the President. There was an emphasis on the people’s rights, on studying their native language, on reinstating the old [i.e. Crimean Tatar –ed.] names of their villages. These issues were raised.

I: Did Ukraine not implement any policies in regard to the national question?

RD: Look at Yatsenyuk’s statements. Look at even the statements of Petro Simonenko. Look at any of the statements of previous Ukrainian presidents. Where did they say anything about the privileges of the Crimean Tatar people? Yatsenyuk was loudly grandstanding about Crimean Tatars “land squatting”. But people weren’t squatting because they had a good life. Besides, they were not seizing land that belonged to anybody; it was empty land. And secondly, when the Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea, none of us demanded “give me back my grandfather’s house”—we only asked for compensation from the state. And they did everything by themselves; they built homes themselves.

We are in our homeland. Today it is possible to discuss everything from the outside, but what kind of a patriot are you if you left home and ran away?

Meanwhile in the Crimea, pipes that have been broken since 1968 have not been changed because Crimea was not a priority.

When, in 1988, we returned to the Crimea, we came to our homeland, not to Russia, the USSR or Ukraine, we came home. And all of a sudden our homeland became Ukraine.

And I do not believe in the mass exodus of Crimean Tatars from here; it would have been easily spotted.

Because today we have more rights than ever before, more opportunities than ever before. In terms of the format of elections that was proposed by the Russian Federation, the Crimean Tatars would easily win elections in the densely populated territories.

Actually, the promise is clearly visible that they need to work and there is an expectation that something will be done for them, given the fact that Ukraine did nothing. Things like linking individual villages to the gas network, construction of new schools and social infrastructure, development of the transport network—in such banal work they are much more motivated to work together on the development of the Crimea than in bombastic headlines.

It should also be noted that in the Crimea, Tatars have opened the Tatar language TV channel, “Milliyet”.

The case of the killing of two Crimean Tatars in the Crimea was also resolved. Junta media had already started yelling about repressions and genocide, but reality was far more prosaic—the two Tatars [Memet Salimov and Osman Ibragimov –ed.] were brutally stubbed by a Ukrainian citizen in their own home as a result of a domestic dispute.