By Alina Smutko and Andriy Perun
LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – Lierane has fled Russian invaders twice in the last decade but remains hopeful that she will one day return to her native Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Moscow in 2014.
“Maybe it will happen in 50 years, as happened with my grandmother when she returned to Crimea. It will happen, that’s for sure,” Lierane, 43, told Reuters. She asked not to be identified by her surname as she still has relatives in Crimea.
Lierane and her son Tymur – then aged 5 – fled Crimea in 2016 and settled near Kyiv. Then, after Russian forces almost captured the capital in the early days of their invasion in 2022, they moved to the comparative safety of Lviv in western Ukraine, where she now runs a restaurant.
Like many Crimean Tatars, a Turkic ethnic minority indigenous to the Black Sea peninsula, Lierane’s family history is a tragic tale of displacement, separation and upheaval that goes back to the Soviet era.
Lierane was born in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1980 to a family which, like more than 200,000 other Crimean Tatars, was deported en masse to Siberia and Central Asia in 1944 under dictator Josef Stalin.
As Moscow relaxed its authoritarian grip in the 1980s, many generations of Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea. Lierane still remembers flying back in 1988 at the age of eight.
After the annexation, Lierane said she initially became an “unwilling activist” supporting her community, motivated by the disappearance of a friend, Reshat Ametov, whose lifeless body she said was found badly tortured on March 17, 2014.
Fearing increased house searches and arrests by Russian authorities, Lierane said she finally fled Crimea on the advice of a neighbour who had joined Russia’s security services.
International rights groups say Russian authorities in Crimea have persecuted Crimean Tatars to silence dissent, while Ukraine has accused Moscow of trying to erase their culture. Russia has denied systematic human rights abuses or persecution.
Community leaders in Ukraine estimate that 300,000 Crimean Tatars lived on the peninsula before the occupation and that 50,000 have left since 2014.
Lierane believes Russia’s grip on Crimea will not last forever.
“Any empire can collapse, die, transform, disappear from a political map… The desire to go home remains, especially among the Crimean Tatars,” she said.
(Writing by Anastasiia Malenko; Editing by Tom Balmforth and Gareth Jones)
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