Crimean Tatar civic journalist Osman Arifmemetov, unlawfully sentenced by the occupiers to 14 years of imprisonment, has been transferred from the prison in Minusinsk (Krasnoyarsk Krai) to a new place of detention. He is currently being held in Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 3 in Chelyabinsk. According to information from his family, on 14 May 2024, Arifmemetov was removed from Achinsk, and the final destination is reportedly one of the penal colonies in the Orenburg region.

Such transfers constitute the unlawful relocation of Ukrainian citizens from temporarily occupied territories and are a direct violation of international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention. This process has come to be known as a “silent deportation,” which echoes the 1944 genocide of the Crimean Tatar people, when the Soviet regime forcibly deported the entire nation from Crimea to Central Asia.

In a letter to his family dated 19 May, Arifmemetov drew explicit parallels between the current prison transfers and the historical deportation:

“After two days in the [train] cell, the walls and floor became sticky. About 20 passengers in the cells were eating, drinking, breathing, using the toilet, and sweating. Plus, a guard was walking up and down the corridor. Eighty-one years ago [on 18 May 1944], men, women, and children were forcibly loaded into wagons where there were no toilets, no water, and no food. What were they thinking in those stuffy, filthy, stench-filled metal boxes? Here we are taken to the toilet every 4–5 hours. If you need to go badly, you hold it. (…) It was especially suffocating when they closed the windows and pulled down the curtains. Of course, my situation [compared to the deported Muslims] is incomparable.”

This experience of forced isolation and dehumanization is reflected in Arifmemetov’s forthcoming book, My Deportation: Reports by a Crimean Journalist Written in Detention, which he worked on over several years. The texts included in the book were written and sent from detention centers in Simferopol, Rostov-on-Don, Novocherkassk, and the prison in Minusinsk.

The book My Deportation: Reports by a Crimean Journalist Written in Detention documents crimes against freedom of speech and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It serves as both a personal and collective chronicle of the “silent deportation” era, during which the Russian Federation continues its policy of persecution, forced relocation, and punitive isolation of Crimean Tatars for their political beliefs, religious practices, and civic activism.