We have already mentioned the aggressor’s propaganda manipulation with the so-called “results of the 2020-2021 census”, according to which the number of people who call themselves ethnic Ukrainians allegedly “decreased” in the occupied Crimea.
However, this “census“ demonstrated a “creative” approach to the national question in Russia itself; because, according to published data, the majority of indigenous peoples and ethnic groups there allegedly significantly “lost” in absolute and relative numbers.
For example, the number of Tatars “according to the results of the 2021 census” was declared at 4.71 million people, while in 2010 their number in the Russian Federation was declared at 5.31 million people.
It is noteworthy that in the criminal “census” of 2014, in order to “blur” the number of the Crimean Tatar people and further manipulations, the Russian invaders “recorded” in the Crimea a significant part of this ethnic group as “Tatars”, and not “Crimean Tatars”.
However, now the “Tatar issue” has received an interesting continuation in the form of a “letter” promoted by individual “Russian media” by Zabihullo Naderi, who is called “the head of Council of Tatars of Afghanistan”, allegedly sent “to the electronic reception of the Russia’s President”.
In it, Naderi allegedly expresses concern about “the disappearance of 600,000 Tatars” as a result of the census and asks to “re-conduct … a census of the population” “or carefully recheck it”.
It should be noted that since 2021, the activities of the “Afghan Tatars Social and Cultural Foundation”, in which Naderi also participated, have indeed been noticed in Afghanistan, however, this fund did not play a special role in the life of Afghanistan either before the fall of its government or later.
In 2021, the then Afghan authorities recognized the presence in the country of an ethnic group called “Tatars”, and starting from 2007, the authorities of the Republic of Tatarstan began to conduct an active information campaign on “Afghan Tatars”.
The Kremlin’s obvious interest in this process was the additional penetration of Afghanistan, which was then allied with the United States, but the Kazan leaders had their own plans for “newly found fellow tribesmen”, of which, according to the republic’s leadership, there are several million in Afghanistan.
At the moment, no evidence of the ethnic proximity of the Kazan and Afghan Tatars, except for self-name, has been found. But now it is obvious that the card of “Afghan compatriots” in Kazan is increasingly being used in the “internal game” with the Kremlin.
It is also possible that the issue of the “Afghan Tatars” will be used by the Russian occupiers, with the participation and densely “ingrown” of the “Kazan elite” into the Crimean collaborators’ criminal schemes, for provocations specifically in the “Crimean direction”.
