On May 18, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Crimean Tatar Genocide, an information campaign was launched to mark the 80th anniversary of the deportation. Citylights, billboards, and posters appeared in towns and cities across Ukraine to draw public attention to the tragic events of one of Ukraine’s indigenous peoples in the last century.

Stalin ordered the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people in May 1944. In 2 days, 200,000 Crimean Tatars were deported to Central Asia, thousands of kilometers away from their homes and native Crimea. According to various estimates, about 46% of the Crimean Tatar population died as a result. By that time, there was practically no indigenous population left in Crimea, and the Crimean peninsula was subjected to total Russification, destroying even the slightest mention of the Crimean Tatars.

The subject of the information materials were the paintings of Sadykh Adzhy-Selim, who lived through the events that began in May 1944 and documented them in his drawings. They are one of the few surviving testimonies that can tell us the terrible story of the tragic events of the Crimean Tatar people. You can also see photographs of people who survived the deportation and later returned to their native Crimea, most of them again are experiencing Russian terror under the occupation.

The purpose of the information campaign is to honor the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people; to disseminate information about the history of the Crimean Tatar people and the events of 1944 to preserve the national memory and to remind that Crimea must be liberated; to draw attention to the crimes of the occupiers against the Crimean Tatar people after the occupation of 2014, which is a continuation of the systematic destruction of the people that Russia began in the XVIII century.   

Already today, you can find the faces of deportation survivors and images of the Russian crime against the Crimean Tatar people on visual materials in your cities and towns. In total, 207 billboards, 162 citylights, and 8717 posters have been placed in the regions of Ukraine. Additionally, images have already been placed on 163 electronic advertising media in Kyiv.

The information campaign was carried out by the Mission’s team with the support of the Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine (PFRU), funded by aid from the governments of Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as with the support and assistance of the regional military administrations and the Kyiv City Military Administration.