We have repeatedly written that since 2022, the Russian occupiers have intensified the persecution of the Crimean Tatars in the case of the so-called “Crimean Tatar battalion”.
In October last year, it was pointed out about the kidnapping and criminal “trial” of Artur Memetshaev, who was captured by punishers in the Kherson Region together with Arsen Ibraimov, Aider Umerov and Ruslan Abdurakhmanov, and in November – about the criminal “sentence” of the occupiers for Abdurakhmanov.
In December 2020, Nasrulla Saydaliyev, who was captured in Bakhchisarai, and Konstantin Tereshchenko, who was stolen in Henichesk in June, received a criminal “sentence” from the invaders in this “case”.
In March 2023, an illegal “sentence”, also for allegedly “participation in a battalion”, was declared in Dzhankoy against political prisoner Igor Khalilov, and the Kremlin’s outright propaganda order was obvious from the fakes spread by the criminal “adviser to head of the Crimea” Oleg Kryuchkov.
On March 16 and 17, the invaders’ punishers carried out new illegal detentions of Crimean Tatars in this “case”, namely Tahir Seydametov in the Simferopol District and Rustem Virasti near Henichesk.
In total, until April 2023, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center (CTRC) recorded 25 detentions by the Russian occupiers on charges of “participation in the volunteer battalion named after Noman Chelebidzhikhan”, 10 of them in the occupied Crimea, and another 15 in the occupied part of Kherson Region.
On April 14, the aggressor’s propaganda announced that in the occupied Crimea “two Ukrainian citizens were detained who were members of a banned … armed formation,” mentioning the same “battalion”.
Without naming the data of these persons, the aggressor’s propaganda stated that the persons who allegedly joined the “battalion” “did … it with weapons in their hands and in effective cooperation with the Ukrainian border guards” and that their actions allegedly consisted in the fact that they “guarded … the objects” and “inspected vehicles at checkpoints”, adding that under the conditions of Russian occupation, “they did not turn to the ‘police’ with a statement that they had left the armed formation”.
In this vein, it is worth pointing out that, as representatives of the CTRC rightly emphasized at a press conference on April 13, if the supposedly “members of the battalion” detained by the Russian invaders until 2022 were in the legalized public formation for the protection of the state border “Asker”, then the aggressor is obliged to comply with respect to them requirements of the III Geneva Convention, which the occupiers criminally refuse to do.
