U.S. on suffering of Crimean people
The acting U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, Kristina Kvien, has called on Russia to “stop its legacy of inflicting suffering on the people of Crimea,” as Ukraine commemorated the victims of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s mass deportation of Crimean Tatars from their homeland in 1944. The chargé d’affaires issued a video statement on Twitter on May 18, which since 2016 has been marked in Ukraine as the Day of Commemoration of Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatars. The Crimean Tatars were deported en masse from the Black Sea peninsula in May 1944, after Stalin accused them of collaborating with Nazi Germany. Seventy years later, in March 2014, Russia seized Crimea after sending in troops and staging a referendum boycotted by many Crimean Tatars.