The Foreign Ministry voiced its concern over the sentence of five Crimean Tatars in a statement issued on Wednesday.
"We are concerned that our Crimean Tatar kin Dzhemil Gafarov, Servet Gaziev, Erfan Osmanov, Alim Karimov and Seyran Murtaza were sentenced to 13 years in prison in a decision taken today," the statement read, reiterating Türkiye's support for "the Crimean Tatars' right to live freely and safely in their homeland."
The communique noted Ankara expects the "necessary steps to be taken as soon as possible for the freedom of all our compatriots imprisoned in Crimea for political reasons, including the aforementioned ones and Deputy Chairperson of the Crimean Tatar National Assembly Nariman Dzhelyal and our other Crimean Tatar kin Asan Akhtemov and Aziz Akhtemov."
Meanwhile, Ukraine's First Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzheppar called for a strong reaction on Twitter, saying: "With no right to last plea. Russian puppet court sentenced Crimean Tatar political prisoners to 13 years in prison each."
"Russia's occupiers arrested them in 2019 under politically motivated charges. Their health condition is a matter of serious concern. This is a verdict by a degrading authoritarian regime that considers the elderly and disabled as its enemies," she added.
Five men, who were sentenced to 13 years, will also be under judiciary control for up to 18 months after they served their terms according to the court verdict. They are members of Crimean Solidarity, an umbrella group of dissidents that initially started out as a protest movement for the mistreatment of Crimean Tatar Muslims before it expanded to include all dissidents in Crimea. The sentenced men have pleaded not guilty and defended that their only crime was practicing their faith.
Russian forces entered the Crimean Peninsula in February 2014. President Vladimir Putin formally divided the region into two separate federal subjects of the Russian Federation the following month. Crimea's ethnic Tatars have since faced persecution, a situation especially decried by Türkiye.
Türkiye, the European Union, the United States, as well as the U.N. General Assembly, view Crimea’s annexation as illegal.
Ankara is a strong supporter of the Crimean Tatar community. Last year, it started granting unconditional long-term residence permits for Crimean Tatars, a status granted to non-citizens with Turkish ancestry to help those forced to leave their homeland.
According to Tamila Tasheva, the permanent representative of the president of Ukraine in Crimea, around 1,000 Crimean Tatars fled to Türkiye to escape Russian mobilization amid the Ukraine-Russia conflict. She noted that mobilization by an occupying state into its army in occupied territories violates the Geneva Conventions, hence a war crime.
Tasheva, in an exclusive interview with Daily Sabah, maintained that Russia’s crackdown on the peninsula’s Indigenous population now earned another dimension with an illegal mobilization drive, yet also stirring a resistance that has "surprised" her as well. Tasheva said there are currently some 155 political prisoners in Russian-occupied Crimea with 109 of them being Crimean Tatars.