Editor’s Note: This story is part two of a two-part series called “Losing our land,” which exposes Russia’s efforts to push Ukrainians out of Crimea and replace them with Russians. Read the first story here.
It was a quiet February morning when masked and armed men started banging at the door of Crimean Tatar Damir Minadirov’s family home in Yalta, one of the largest cities in Crimea. He asked who they were and was shown an identity card through the peephole. It belonged to an agent of the Russian Federal Security Service, usually referred to as the FSB.
Minadirov quickly posted on Facebook — “FSB is searching at my home” — and opened the door. The agents put him face-down on the floor and took his phone away.
After searching the house, the men took him to the local FSB office. It was 2016, and by that time, the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea had been under Russian occupation for two years.
Minadirov invoked Article 51 of the Russian constitution, which grants the right not to testify against oneself.
“They put a plastic bag on my head,” he said, “and decided to use the ‘good cop/bad cop’ tactic. They were questioning me for 12 hours.”
The agents would strangle him, then let him breathe and then repeat the process, Minadirov said. They also threatened they would kidnap him and make him disappear, he said.
What they wanted from Minadirov was a confession that he was a part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamist political movement founded in 1953. It has been banned in Russia as a terrorist organization since 2003. However, it is not prohibited in Ukraine, nor in most of Europe. Despite standing for the creation of an Islamic State, Hizb ut-Tahrir believes its goal can be achieved peacefully.
Crimean Tatars like Minadirov are a vocal ethnic minority in Crimea and a traditionally Muslim ethnic group. Many of them opposed the Russian invasion of Crimea, seeing Russia as a repressive successor to the Soviet Union, which persecuted the Crimean Tatars for decades.
After Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it set out to suppress the minority.
The FSB has been searching mosques, confiscating Islamic literature and throwing dozens of people behind bars. As of July, over 80 Crimean Tatars are under arrest on terrorism charges, and more people are arrested on a daily basis. Many of them are accused of having ties to Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Minadirov was among 12 Crimean Tatars arrested on Feb. 11, 2016 across Crimea. The FSB wanted to coerce him into becoming an informant. He refused. They tortured and harassed him for 12 hours, but eventually let him go.
Damir Minadirov, a Crimean Tatar and a native of Crimea, talks with the Kyiv Post in his rented apartment in the Kyiv suburbs on July 1, 2020. He moved to Kyiv in 2016 after suffering persecution from Russian occupation authorities in Crimea. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Along with Minadirov, they freed half of the suspects captured that day. But they kept six, who would then be convicted of terrorism in 2019 in a court in Rostov-on-Don, Russia.
They were sentenced to up to 19 years behind bars, even though the prosecution offered virtually no evidence that they had anything to do with terrorism. One of the key pieces of “evidence” against them was a tapped phone call in which they discuss, among other things, a theoretical situation in which Turkey takes Crimea from Russia.
Amnesty International condemned their conviction. It considers all six men to be prisoners of conscience, imprisoned solely for their political, religious or other beliefs.
After his arrest, Minadirov decided to leave Crimea for several months to wait out the storm. On a chilly day in February 2016, he crossed the de facto border to mainland Ukraine with a light bag containing the bare necessities. Despite his hopes, he never got to return.
Leaving home
The decision to leave his home didn’t come easily.
“I was not going to leave because I was not guilty of anything. I remained in Crimea for another week,” Minadirov said while making traditional Turkish coffee in his rented apartment in a Kyiv suburb on July 1.
But the FSB wouldn’t let him get away so easily.
“(FSB) detectives started coming to the place where my mother worked. They wanted her to persuade me to start collaborating with them,” he said.
So Minadirov decided to leave for mainland Ukraine for a little while until everything calmed down at home.
He packed a suit, a few shirts, a pair of jeans, trainers, and boots in a small travel bag. That was it.
“It is of cabin baggage size,” Minadirov said, showing off the little black bag. “I thought I would stay for a month or two. But, since 2016, I have never traveled back there, never returned to Crimea.”
After a few months away from home, Minadirov realized that returning back was still dangerous and he would have to settle in Kyiv.
Ever since he left Yalta, the FSB agents have been paying visits to his mother and friends to question them about him. His name is mentioned in criminal proceedings against the so-called “Yalta Group,” Crimean Tatars arrested together with Minadirov and convicted of terrorism.
As long as Crimea is under Russia’s control, he is sure it is impossible for him to return home.
Resistance
Minadirov’s resistance to Russian occupation was the reason he attracted FSB attention in the first place.
As a law student, Minadirov volunteered at an organization called Crimean Field Mission for Human Rights. It was devoted to helping Crimean natives persecuted by the Russian regime.
“Almost immediately after the events of 2014, when Russia seized the peninsula, the searches began and people started disappearing,” Minadirov said.
One of the human rights defenders Minadirov worked with was Emir-Usein Kuku. Together they traveled across Crimea to provide legal advice for those in need.
A view on Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, a suburb of Kyiv, that became a new home for many Crimean Tatars after Russia had occupied their home. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Soon, they started noticing that their phones were showing signs of being tapped and that they were often followed by a car. In April 2015, Emir was seriously beaten by FSB agents who wanted to bring him in to their office for questioning.
The two men had tried to protect others, but ended up needing protection themselves.
Emir was sentenced to 12 years in Russian prison. Minadirov managed to escape.
When he moved to Kyiv, Minadirov filed a lawsuit against three of FSB agents who beat him to the European Court of Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, France. It is pending.
A new life
In Kyiv, Minadirov met his future wife Arzy Bekirova, who also fled Crimea.
Minadirov and Bekirova celebrated their wedding in a Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv in September 2017. Both hailing from Yalta, they had long known about each other, but never met in person before mutual friends introduced them in autumn 2016.
Bekirova also left Crimea after the occupation. When the Russians came, she was a medical student in one of the peninsula’s universities. She transferred to Lviv University in western Ukraine in 2014.
She now works as a general practitioner at a hospital near Kyiv.
Minadirov works as a lawyer at the Human Rights Movement of Crimea, a non-profit. Much of his work is helping people who have faced persecution in Russia get a permit to live in Ukraine.
He also manages his own little business, a halal meat store. The idea came to him when he couldn’t find high-quality halal meat in Kyiv.
Damir Minadirov laughs while cutting meat in his halal meat shop located in the Kyiv suburbs on July 1, 2020. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Minadirov lives and works in a suburb of Kyiv called Petropavlivska Borshchahivka. It is home to many Crimean Tatars who re-settled here after Russia seized their homeland in 2014. Since the Crimean annexation, tens of thousands of Crimean natives have left the peninsula. At least 45,550 of them moved to mainland Ukraine.
Minadirov’s store neighbors a flower shop and a supermarket, both owned by Crimean Tatars. In a nearby building, there is a Crimean Tatar bakery that makes baklava, a traditional dessert pastry made of layers of filo dough filled with chopped nuts and sweetened with honey.
“Almost an entire team of employees is Crimean Tatars, internally displaced people,” Minadirov said of the supermarket’s staff. The woman selling flowers in a glass building next to it also wears a long dress and a hijab.
“This is, I think, the largest Crimean Tatar community, where so many of us live. The bigger ones are, probably, only in Henichesk, Kherson, and Novooleksiivka,” Minadirov said, naming cities and towns on the Black Sea coast near Crimea.
The neighboring village with a similar name, Sofiivska Borshchahivka, has also become a new home for many Crimean Tatars. A few of them opened a restaurant that serves Crimean Tatar dishes and started a few tiny shops. At local playgrounds, kids can be spotted wearing hijabs.
“Life just went this way,” Minadirov said about the new community. “First, a few families arrived here. Then those who were about to move called them and asked where they had stayed. ‘Okay, we want to be next to you,’ so the kids and wives become friends. It is just easier this way,” he said.
Coming home?
Bright red pomegranates are scattered on the kitchen table at Minadirov and Berkirova’s apartment. They came from the garden of Bekirova’s father in Yalta. He planted pomegranate trees when she was a child, but they started bearing fruits after she had already left Crimea.
“Fruit-bearing is in full swing and we are not there,” Bekirova said. “These parcels with pomegranates are now traveling to us from Crimea in suitcases together with persimmon and nuts.”
No matter how hospitable Kyiv is, she dreams of returning home. She wants her own pomegranate garden in Yalta and her kids and grandchildren to play under them.
“I really want this. It is my dream. Damir is indifferent to this, but I am sure that he just hides his feelings,” Bekirova said.
Arzy Bekirova (L) and Damir Minadirov, Crimean Tatars and natives of Crimea, make traditional Turkish coffee in their rented apartment in the Kyiv suburbs on July 1, 2020. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
“I want my kids to have this feeling of the motherland, the feeling of home. Of course, we settled down here and everything is fine,” she added. “But I feel like I am visiting here and that all this is temporary. I hope so. I want to go home anyway,” she continued.
Being away from Crimea and longing to return is not new for Crimean Tatars. The nation has been expelled from its homeland multiple times. That’s how they became a minority in a place where 93% of the population was Crimean Tatar in 1760.
According to the 2001 Ukrainian census, the last before the annexation of Crimea, Crimean Tatars make up just 12% of the peninsula’s population.
In May 1944, the Soviet government deported the entire Crimean Tatar population, over 190,000 people, to Central Asia and some northeastern regions of Russia. A third of all Crimean Tatars died during the deportation.
Both Minadirov and Bekirova’s grandparents were among those deported. Their parents managed to move back to Crimea only in the late 1980s and early 1990s, something that had been forbidden for decades.
It was painful for their parents to watch them leave Crimea after the 2014 Russian annexation.
“It was a very serious shock for my mom when she realized that I would have to leave Crimea,” Minadirov said.
“Being born in deportation, my parents were raised and have lived in such an atmosphere that you need to be in Crimea, on your native land. All these conversations about Crimea have always been grounded on deep feelings.”
“My parents moved back in 1991 and this was something they had planned, probably, always ever since their families were deported,” Bekirova said. “This (feeling) is passed down from generation to generation.”
“This is some kind of a blood thing, I do not know how to explain it, inherent at the genetic level,” she added. “We feel the same as our grandparents did: We hope to move back sometime. The question is when.”
