Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Timothy Garton Ash: Can Ukraine save itself from Putin and the oligarchs?
"Welcome to the nation state of Ukraine," says Mustapha Dzhemilev, a diminutive, soft-spoken 71-year-old leader of the Crimean Tatars, gentle on the outside, hard as steel within. He was deported from Crimea on Stalin's orders in 1944, when he was just six months old, along with so many fellow Tatars. Persecuted under Soviet rule, he went on hunger strike for 303 days. A year ago, after Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea, this quiet fighter was banned from re-entering the peninsula his forebears had inhabited for centuries, long before the Russians did. And now here he is in Kyiv, welcoming us to a new Ukraine.