Oliver Loode, an Estonian civic activist who has strongly criticized Russia’s persecution of the Crimean Tatar people and ban on the Crimean Tatar Mejlis [representative assembly], has been banned from Russia until he’s 99. While it is obviously uncertain whether he will live that long, Loode believes that the main question is about whether the Russian Federation can survive in its present form. “It shows something about the true strength of this supposed superpower”, he writes, that it can find a civic activist and human rights defender like himself a threat.
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Halya Coynash: ‘Friend of the Crimean Tatar people’ banned from Russia for 55 years
Crimean Tatars flag waves at the ceremony commemorating the victims of the 1944 deportation of the indigenous people of Crimea, the Crimean Tatars, at Sofiyivska Square in Kyiv on May 18, 2018.
