When Mustafa Dzhemilev read the news about Donald Trump’s plan for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, he could not believe his eyes. Part of the US administration’s peace plan, say recent reports, would involve Washington recognising annexed Crimea as legitimate Russian territory, among other concessions to the Kremlin that Trump hopes might stop Russia’s war on Ukraine.
“The whole world knows what happened in Crimea … It would be such a damage to the reputation of the US that it will be hard for them to recover. It would be shameful,” said Dzhemilev, a Soviet-era dissident turned Crimean Tatar political leader, in an interview at his office in Kyiv.
Back in March 2014, during the Russian annexation, Dzhemilev was asked for his public declaration of support for Moscow’s takeover by Vladimir Putin himself. The Russian president spoke by telephone to Dzhemilev, promising money and support for the Crimean Tatar community in exchange for his backing. “He explained how we’ll be so happy under Russian rule,” Dzhemilev said, recalling the conversation with disdain.
Dzhemilev turned down the deal, saying that after centuries of oppressing the Crimean Tatars, the Russians were unlikely to change, and telling Putin the best thing he could do was remove his troops from the peninsula. A month later, when returning to Crimea from Kyiv, he was stopped at the new Russian frontier and told he was banned from entering. He has lived in exile in Kyiv ever since.
Unlike government officials, who are required to moderate their opinions of the Trump administration for the sake of diplomatic nicety, the 81-year-old Dzhemilev pulls no punches. He talks quietly yet with a sharp turn of phrase and a dark sense of humour, pausing every few minutes to light a fresh cigarette or answer his mobile phone, set to a barking dog ringtone.
“We are in a situation where the head of the US administration, the president, is now a person who feels no emotions, in whose head there is only deal-making … To say the things he says, to say Ukraine shouldn’t have started this war. Have they been keeping this man in the dark for the last years? Does he know anything? Has he read anything?”
He recalled an interview with Trump’s Russia envoy, Steve Witkoff, who failed to remember the names of all the regions he believed Russia had a reasonable claim to. “That’s a diplomat from the United States of America? I’ve seen a lot of stupid diplomats in my life, but one like him, that’s a first,” he said.
This is not Dzhemilev’s first exile. In May 1944, when he was six months old, Joseph Stalin had the entire Crimean Tatar population rounded up and deported to Soviet Central Asia on cattle wagons, accusing them of collaboration during the Nazi occupation. Tens of thousands died on the journey.
The Crimean Tatars had been the majority of the population in Crimea until the first Russian annexation, under Catherine the Great in the 18th century. In the intervening years, Russians had begun to dominate, and after Stalin’s deportation every single Crimean Tatar was removed.
From exile, Dzhemilev and other dissidents campaigned for a return. He received the first of many jail sentences in 1966 for refusing to do his military service, saying he could not fight in the army of the country that had stolen his homeland.
It was not until 1989 that Crimean Tatars were officially allowed to return, where they found a very different Crimea and a local population that often viewed them as intruders. Many of their houses had been seized and their villages destroyed.
Dzhemilev was elected chair of the Mejlis, the informal parliament of the Crimean Tatars, in 1991. During the early years of Ukrainian rule, Crimean Tatars were often accused of being separatists, wanting their own homeland in Crimea. In the end, they turned out to be some of Ukraine’s fiercest defenders in the region. Since the annexation, Russia has launched multiple waves of persecution and arrests against the community, which is estimated to number around 250,000, or about 10% of the population of Crimea.
Many Crimean Tatars have agreed to work with Russian authorities, but Dzhemilev insists that most have done so only under pressure. He conceded, however, that 11 years of Russian rule had made an impact. Children who were in kindergarten at the time of the annexation will soon be old enough to be mobilised into the Russian army, having had a decade of schooling in the Russian curriculum. “Of course, this has an effect on some people’s consciousness,” he said.
Still, he believes that many Crimean Tatar families will ensure their children do not lose sight of their history, and is heartened by one of his own earliest memories, as a young schoolboy in 1953, when it was announced on the radio that Stalin had died. “Everyone was crying, but not the Crimean Tatars. The first thing my dad said was, ‘Finally, the dog has kicked it’,” he remembered. A relative came by with some onions, in case crying on demand was required.
Dzhemilev spent a total of 15 years in prisons and camps during the Soviet period, after seven different court cases. “The biggest single sentence I got was three years. By today’s Russian standards I guess they would have shot me 10 times. They are destroying the lives of people by giving them 17 or 20 years for some small thing that was overheard,” he said.
There was a moment, in late 2022 and 2023, when Ukraine’s army was on the offensive against the Russians and anything seemed possible, including Kyiv winning back Crimea. Dzhemilev recalled how, at the end of 2023, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, came to visit him, suggesting he record a New Year’s Eve address that Ukrainian hackers could show on television channels in Crimea, replacing Putin’s. In the address, Dzhemilev announced that 2024 would be the final year of Russian rule and advised recent arrivals to return to Russia.
That did not happen. “It seems the liberation of Crimea has been postponed,” he conceded. If the US does recognise Crimea, Dzhemilev hopes international leaders will put some kind of pressure on Russia to give guarantees to the Crimean Tatars.
He has called on Turkey to push for the creation of an international monitoring group to work in Crimea, and for members of the Mejlis to be given the freedom to travel to Crimea with immunity from prosecution under Russian law. He was due to meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a diplomatic forum in Antalya in April to put the request to him in person.
The pair have met several times before, but this time Erdoğan cancelled the meeting, citing a packed schedule, and sent a deputy instead, Dzhemilev said: “One of his aides said to me that it wasn’t really about time, it was because this is a person who likes to be able to fulfil people’s requests. And he knew more or less what I was going to ask, and he knows he won’t be able to fulfil it.”
Dzhemilev’s biography has a sad symmetry to it: decades of exile culminating in a return home, only for another exile to begin. He dismissed any personal hardship, noting that his years in the gulag had made him accustomed to being far from home. “Personally, I am quite comfortable, I have no complaints. But the fact that our people fought to return home after the 1944 deportation for half a century and now are once again in a forced deportation, that is quite awful,” he said.
