KYIV -- Ukraine on May 18 marked the 79th anniversary of Stalin-era deportations of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia.
The date known in Ukraine as the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatars coincided this year with the Day of Vyshyvanka -- the Ukrainian tunic adorned with traditional embroidery that has become a symbol of patriotism and resistance to Russia's aggression. The Day of Vyshyvanka is marked on the third Thursday of May each year.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a statement that the day commemorating the Crimean Tatars shows that they "survived the deportation and will live free" after Russian-occupied Crimea returns to Ukrainian control.
"Today, I am wearing a vyshyvanka embroidered with ornaments symbolizing the unity of the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar peoples. Those are symbols of our power and our will to live in our homeland," Zelenskiy said.
Refat Chubarov, chairman of Crimean Tatars' self-governing body Mejlis, told RFE/RL that after the Soviet government deported Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in 1944, Crimea lost its legal status as an autonomous republic and was turned into an oblast, a regular region similar to any other within the Soviet Union, because the indigenous people of the peninsula were forced out.
After the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, during the so-called Nikita Khrushchev's thaw, unlike other ethnic groups deported by the Soviet government to Central Asian and Siberia, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, Germans, and Koreans were not allowed to return to their native lands.
Only in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the late 1980s did Crimean Tatars started returning to Crimea in large numbers in a migration that occurred without the permission of authorities.
Chubarov expressed hope that after the defeat of Russia's ongoing unprovoked invasion, Kyiv will find a solution regarding Crimea's legal status, which should be an autonomous region within Ukraine.
"I am sure the Ukrainian nation that consolidated around itself all indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities residing in Ukraine, turning them into a single political nation, will always be capable to find solutions now that fully correspond to the international laws and contribute to the democratic development of the independent Ukraine," Chubarov said.
Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 was vocally opposed by the majority of Crimean Tatars, who are now a sizable minority in the region.