“These years and these texts are history now,” wrote the prominent Crimean Ukrainian journalist Mykola Semena in the foreword to the English edition of his latest book, The Crimean Report, which came out in time for the fifth anniversary of the illegal occupation of Crimea by Russia.
The book, comprised of his 113 op-eds and articles written for Crimea.Realities, a service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, chronicles in great detail the first two years of the occupation until Semena was put on trial for his journalism.
The book offers a fascinating insider look into life on the peninsula by Semena, a local journalist who painstakingly documented the political, economic, and cultural decline after the military invasion and referendum: the expulsion of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, a crackdown on dissidents and free media, rising taxes, an exodus of investors, and growing poverty. No area of life was unaffected.
Semena’s life spans all of modern Crimean history. Born in Chernihiv Oblast, he was almost four years old when the peninsula was transferred to Ukraine in February 1954 on the orders of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
After graduating from the Communist Party journalism school, Semena moved to Crimea in 1982 to pursue a journalistic career in various newspapers. He was one of the few independent journalists who stayed in Crimea and didn’t join the Russian Journalists Union after the Kremlin took control of the peninsula in March 2014.
“Those of us who remained in Crimea thought that in the 21st century we would still be able to work as ordinary journalists, not spies, and continue serving our readers. We understood how wrong we were when the searches and arrests began. In the blink of an eye, the invaders took Crimea out of 21st century and back to 1937,” he wrote in the foreword to the English edition.
In spring 2016, Semena was arrested by Russian Security Services, the FSB, and accused of calling for separatism in one of his articles. In a sham trial, a judge handed him down a two-and-half years of suspended sentence and banned him from any public activity, journalism, and leaving the territory of Crimea.
The English edition doesn’t include that very article: A 2015 op-ed titled “Blockade is a necessary first step to the liberation of Crimea” authored by Valentyn Honchar, one of over a dozen of pseudonyms that Semena used after the occupation.
In the op-ed, he argued that Ukraine should have cut off the electricity and food supplies to Crimea on the next day after the Kremlin-appointed authorities had signed an agreement “to join Russia” on March 18, 2014. This would have demonstrated how helpless the Kremlin was, and the residents of Crimea would have seen that Russia can’t provide for it, he wrote.
The new illegitimate government promised Crimeans a bright future five years ago. But Semena accurately predicted that many ambitious projects, or as he calls them in the book, “figments of imagination,” would never become a reality.
Crimea never got its gambling zone near Mykolaivka village and never developed its IT and science cluster, which the authorities claimed would turn the peninsula into Silicon Valley. On the contrary, foreign investment dwindled amid the EU and US sanctions. The Chinese abandoned their multi-billion project of building a large port near Yevpatoria. The former chief architect of Simferopol, Ernst Mavlyutov, was quietly fired and will always be remembered for his suggestion to demolish the Old City in order to rebuild it as a city “better than Monaco and Paris.”
The new illegitimate government explicitly lied to paint a picture of a booming economy. Semena reported on manipulations with statistics and census data, overblown agricultural production figures and tourism numbers. The lies were amplified by the Russian state propaganda media that heralded the KrymNash (Crimea is Ours) campaign as the ultimate triumph of the Russian world. Meanwhile, Semena dispelled the myths about Crimea being “always Russian” and extensively wrote on the peninsula’s troubled history.
At the same time, Semena repeatedly appealed to the Ukrainian government for action, believing that Ukraine was losing the information war against Russia, as the Kremlin-appointed authorities banned Ukrainian- and Crimean Tatar newspapers and television stations.
“The population of Crimea is completely isolated from the media space of Ukraine, brainwashed by Russian propaganda, disoriented and doesn’t know about the situation in Ukraine,” he wrote in June 2014. “If Ukraine wants to return Crimea, Kyiv must create Ukrainian media space in Crimea without a delay.”
He opined that Ukraine could not resist the Russian aggression on its own, and the president of Ukraine had to initiate the so-called anti-Putin coalition, a joint international effort for the liberation of Crimea. The coalition had to employ all available measures — political, economic, and legal means, as well as threats of military force — to make Russia return stolen territories.
“The entire Ukrainian policy towards Crimea should be changed so it can serve the purpose of liberating Crimea,” he wrote.
“A time will come when the occupation will end, and Crimea will remember it as a nightmare that should never happen again.”
For inquiries where to get the book, email the Ministry of the Information Policy of Ukraine at [email protected]
