"It was impossible to live there without a Russian passport. And those passports were the only legal documents we were given during the now over eight years of Russian occupation in Crimea," said Veli Rustemov, a 25-year-old Akmescit (Simferopol) citizen.

Rustemov, who uses an alias to protect his identity for security reasons, spoke to Daily Sabah through a phone interview from Türkiye's northwestern province of Bursa.

The young man of Crimean Tatar origin – the peninsula’s Indigenous people who have made up the majority for centuries in the region – said he fled to Türkiye with a group of seven people, leaving behind their families.

Rustemov, who served in the Ukrainian military between 2011 and 2012, was a Ukrainian citizen but had to acquire Russian citizenship and passport after Moscow occupied Crimea in 2014 because "anything from owning a property to getting medical treatment at the hospital became impossible without the Russian passports," he said.

He lived as a Russian citizen just until his most recent escape from Crimea, his hometown, for Türkiye to flee from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mobilization in his war against Ukraine – a country Rustemov, and hundreds of men like him once had citizenship and even served in the military.

Even before Russia started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year and the Kremlin announced a partial mobilization on Sept. 21, Moscow has been cracking down on the peninsula’s Indigenous population while "weaponizing" the "passports."

The persecution of Crimean Tatars, although haven’t been covered much by global media before the occupation, was a sneak preview of the tactics that what Kremlin is capable of doing in newly seized territories of Ukraine.

Safiye Chausheva, whose name is also a pseudonym for security reasons, told Daily Sabah that "everyone in Crimea was obliged to get Russian passports in order to continue living there."

"I had an apartment in my name, and if I wanted to sell it I had to have Russian citizenship as all the documents had to be Russian after the occupation," Chausheva, a former journalist, shared.

Chausheva, who also confirmed that many have most recently escaped in order not to join the mobilization, said that "there are thousands of people like her who just didn’t have a choice to exist except to become Russian citizens following the annexation."

'War Crime'

Meanwhile, the permanent representative of the president of Ukraine in Crimea, Tamila Tasheva noted around 1,000 Crimean Tatars fled to Türkiye to escape Russian mobilization.

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.

Many people in Crimea are protesting against the occupation and that there is a huge community of anti-war activists, she said.

"Before the full-scale invasion, our people didn’t understand that even if they do some activities in Crimea, Ukraine would need this later," Tasheva said, adding that now it is understood how important Crimea can be to support Ukraine and its fight against the Russian invasion.

The recent activism in Crimea against the Russian invasion, which was not always under the spotlight, has been one of the main triggering factors of Russia’s oppression in the strategic Black Sea peninsula.

Over the past eight years of the Russian presence in Crimea, activists’ homes have been raided while most independent Crimean Tatar media outlets were shut down.

According to the figures shared by Tasheva, there are currently some 155 political prisoners in Russian-occupied Crimea with 109 of them being Crimean Tatars, including deputy speaker of the now-banned Crimean Tatar Mejlis (Parliament), Neriman Celal.

Apart from oppression targeting those who voice against invasion, full-force "Russification" was also among the main tactics of Russian occupiers in "returning to the peninsula’s glorious days."

Rustemov, who doesn't plan on staying in Türkiye for long because he wants to return to Ukraine after acquiring the necessary documents, said: "Under Russian occupation, we had nothing, no rights in Crimea, unlike Ukrainian rule in the peninsula when no one considered themselves as an 'enemy' of each other."

"During the Russian rule, our houses were occasionally raided early in the mornings. Occupier police and military officials have detained our family members, knowing that we were loyal to Ukraine," he shared.

False accusations

Although Crimea has three official languages – Ukrainian, Russian and the Crimean Tatar language – Rustemov regretted that their language was "ripped off from everywhere," and it is only spoken "in personal circles like mosques or homes now."

He said Russian forces have banned some religious books in Russian and Crimean Tatars languages and when they find those books in mosques, "they shut down mosques. If they find these in houses, they detain the owners."

"Russian occupiers accuse them of being members of fabricated terrorist organizations," Rustemov lamented.

"We are just Muslims, we have nothing to do with those organizations as they claim our involvement," he added.

Rustemov shared that their situation was better when the peninsula was part of Ukraine before the annexation, sharing his wish: "We are waiting impatiently for Crimea to be free so that our nation can live peacefully."

Many may dub it a slow development, but the Ukrainian parliament last year adopted a special law, designating the Crimean Tatars as the Indigenous population of Crimea and became the only country doing so.

According to Tasheva, the reason such developments are quite slow is that they did not have a "real democracy" in Ukraine before 2014 as they had a totalitarian regime but they are "now learning from their mistakes."

Now that Russia occupies Crimea and uses the peninsula as a huge military base to carry operations toward Ukrainian soil, Ukraine's urge to reoccupy the peninsula and the resistance they see in Crimea has become more and more important, Tasheva added.

Putin launched the Ukrainian invasion, what he calls a "special military operation," on Feb. 24, 2022, to "deter threats to Russian security and to protect Russian speakers." Ukraine and its allies accuse Moscow of an unprovoked imperialist-style grab for territory.

The country currently does not have full control over any of the provinces it raged a full-scale operation on except one Ukrainian province, which is Crimea, and according to the officials and residents of the region, as long as the Kremlin does not pull its claw from the peninsula, neither Crimean Tatars nor Ukrainians will be free from invasion.