Tamila Tasheva, the Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and Maria Tomak, Head of the Crimea Platform Department, held an online meeting with representatives of the Bulgarian Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD).

Founded in Sofia in 1989, the Center for the Study of Democracy is a European public policy institute, an independent, non-partisan organization fostering the reform process through impact on policy and civil society.

Ruslan Stefanov, the Program Director of the Center, greeted the Mission of the Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and noted that the CSD thoroughly monitors the situation in Ukraine and particularly in the occupied Crimea. The Center is deeply focused on tracking Russian disinformation, including narratives regarding Ukraine.

Tamila Tasheva informed about the current situation in the temporarily occupied Crimea, about protest movements, in particular the female partisan movement “Zla Mavka”, about the successes of the Ukrainian military in sinking a one third of the Russian Black Sea fleet, about the policies and strategies of the reintegration and cognitive deoccupation of Crimea developed by the Mission. The Permanent Representative thanked the Center’s experts for publishing analytical materials exposing the circumvention of European sanctions against russia by some countries.

Maria Tomak drew attention to the military use of the territory of Crimea by russia, to the systematic illegal export of Ukrainian grain from the newly occupied territories, the use of the territory of Crimea as a hub for the deportation of Ukrainian citizens, including children, the looting of Ukrainian cultural heritage on the peninsula by the russians, persecution and imprisonment of the residents of Crimea, especially Crimean Tatars, for political reasons, persecution of journalists and restriction of freedom of speech, oppression against the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, colonization of the peninsula.

The participants of the meeting agreed to deepen the cooperation between the Mission and the CSD. CSD representatives got actively interested in the activities within the Crimea Platform framework and expressed their readiness to call on the parliament of Bulgaria as well as the parliaments of other European countries to recognize the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by the Soviet russian authorities in 1944 as an act of genocide, as the parliaments of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and the House of Commons of Canada have already done. The Mission, in its turn, was invited to participate in the events organized by the CSD. The CSD was especially interested in the ways of cooperation with the Mission towards countering Russian disinformation campaigns, which are actively operating in Bulgaria and a number of other European countries.