Crimean Tatar leader barred entry to Crimea by Russian government

Mustafa Dhzemilev, a longtime leader of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis and Ukrainian parliamentary MP, was given an act at the Crimean-Ukrainian border, as he was traveling to Kyiv, that bans his entry for five years, reported on April 22 the press secretary of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis. The Ukrayinska Pravda news site provided a photographed copy of the document, which indicates the five-year ban began on April 19.  

Zenon Zawada: For all its propaganda painting Ukraine as a hot bed on ethnic persecution, the Russian government is demonstrating that it far outdoes the Ukrainians when it comes to intolerance. Dhzemilev’s ban confirms the worst fears of the Crimean Tatars, which is that they will be persecuted even worse now that the peninsula’s majority ethnic Russian population has the direct support of the Putin government. Given that the ban is merely the latest in a persecution campaign against ethnic minorities in Crimea, which has included beatings and murder, the Russian government is demonstrating a nationalism and ethnic chauvinism that was last seen in Europe during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.