Today we are going to tell you about two young people – 25-year-old Crimean Tatar Lenia Umerova and 20-year-old Crimean Tatar Appaz Kurtamet. They don’t know each other, but they are united by the fact that Russia is trying to break the fates of both of them.
Just like their grandparents in 1944, Appaz and Leniye became victims of Russia, but in 2022.
Just like then, the aggressor state is using criminal practices to put pressure on the indigenous people. The deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people in 1944 has received a new “wrapper” from Russia in the 21st century – persecution, illegal “arrests” and “trials”, the deportation and detention of dozens of Crimean Tatars in Russia. It is important to talk about this constantly, and especially now, on the days of commemoration of the victims of the genocide of the Crimean Tatar people. To prevent this from happening in the future.
Appaz Kurtamet, a 20-year-old resident of Novooleksiivka, Henichesk district, was abducted by the Russian occupiers at the Chongar checkpoint on the administrative border with the temporarily occupied Crimea on July 23, 2022.
Only a few weeks later, unidentified persons informed his parents that Appaz was in a filtration camp. For the next three months, the boy’s whereabouts, legal status and the reason for his detention were unknown.
Only in February 2023, the occupiers began the trial, and in April, the occupation court of Simferopol illegally sentenced Appaz Kurtamet to 7 years in a strict regime colony for allegedly transferring funds to the volunteer battalion “Crimea”.
The story of Crimean Tatar Lenia Umerova is also striking. Russian police detained the girl in early December 2022 while crossing the Russian-Georgian border for allegedly violating the rules of staying in a restricted area. She was on her way to the occupied Crimea to visit her father with cancer.
At the same time, a Russian court found Umerova guilty of “violating the regime of the state border” and fined her 2 thousand rubles. After that, the girl was placed in the Center for the Temporary Detention of Foreign Citizens near Vladikavkaz until March 13!
Since then, a number of protocols have been drawn up against her and ridiculous charges have been invented for her administrative arrest. In May, the Ukrainian citizen was arrested for another 2 months on suspicion of alleged “espionage”.
On May 17, the FSB released a video of the arrested Lenia and called her a “Ukrainian spy.” It is now known that the girl was transferred from Vladikavkaz to Moscow.
Both Leniye Umerova and Appaz Kurtamet need our support!
We urge you to join the Letters to a Free Crimea initiative and write them letters. Another 180 political prisoners, who are illegally detained in the occupied Crimea or deported to the territory of the Russian Federation, also need words of support.
Instructions for writing letters can be found here: https://cutt.ly/e5IoS7o