If Russia’s frightening militarization of childhood at home is aimed at getting young people to love and want to ‘defend’ their country, in occupied Crimea, Russia also wants children to hate Ukraine

One of a barrage of repressive laws with implications for occupied Crimea is one steeply increasing punishment for something loosely termed ‘defamation’

A Russian court has sentenced three Crimean Tatars, including a father and son, to horrific terms of imprisonment without any crime, on the basis of discussions about their Muslim faith and political subjects, including Russia’s persecution of Muslims

This was a brazen act of racial profiling by the Russian occupation regime against Crimean Tatars in the latter’s own homeland

Children in Russian-occupied Crimea have seen their father, grandfather and uncle all taken away. Will they come for their mother next? Or for the children themselves?

This follows an illegal decree by Russian President Vladimir Putin calling Ukrainians ‘foreigners’ and prohibiting them from owning land in around 80% of Crimea

Childhood ended abruptly for 20 Crimean Tatar children in 2020, when armed and masked Russian enforcement officers burst into their homes, turned them upside down and took their fathers away

Russia has begun its most overtly repressive mass trial of Crimean Tatar civic journalists and activists three days before New Year in an obvious attempt to minimize publicity for ‘trials’ aimed at c silencing those who tell the world about Russia"s violations in occupied Crimea

Thanks solely to civic activists, 65-year-old Halyna Dovhopola has been moved to another cell in Moscow after being beaten several times by her cellmate

The ‘police’ in Russian-occupied Crimea effectively abducted Vilen Temeryanov on 28 December, holding the Crimean Solidarity civic journalist in custody on nonsensical charges of ‘organizing a mass event’

It is well over a year since Ivan Yatskin, a father of three small children, was seized in occupied Crimea and taken to the notorious Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, accused of ‘state treason’ by a country that invaded and annexed his Crimean homeland

A Russian prosecutor has demanded sentences of 19, 18 and 13 years against three Crimean Tatars who are not accused of any recognizable crime

Yet another ‘trial’ of Crimean Tatar political prisoners has begun, with this one dangerously likely to cause the death of one of the ‘defendants’ well before the predetermined verdict.

The trial has begun in Russian-occupied Crimea of Aider Kadyrov, a civic journalist reporting on human rights violations for Crimean Solidarity and the Russian website Grani.ru

The scale of the visitations suggests that this is not just some local police department trying to improve its statistics on ‘countering extremism’ before the end of the year, but aimed at maximum intimidation

The Russian prosecution has demanded an 11-year harsh regime sentence against 63-year-old Oleh Prykhodko although the charges against him were consistently demolished in court, and shown to be flagrantly falsified

Activists from the civic movement #LiberateCrimea are calling on Ukrainian MPs to take individual Kremlin hostages under their care, with the initiative strongly supported by former political prisoners like Oleg Sentsov and Edem Bekirov

The World-renowned Massandra winery in Russian-occupied Crimea was ‘sold’ on 14 December to a subsidiary of the Rossiya Bank owned by billionaire Yury Kovalchuk, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court [ICC], Fatou Bensouda has found reasonable grounds for believing that war crimes and crimes against humanity, falling within ICC jurisdiction

A Russian-occupation ‘court’ has found Venera Mustafayeva guilty of infringing regulations during the pandemic over her solitary picket on the day that her prisoner of conscience son, Server Mustafafayev was sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment