Putin to look into Crimea Tatar rehabilitation

FE Team | Published: April 02, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

MOSCOW, April 1 (AFP): Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday promised a top Tatar official in Russia he would consider rehabilitation for the Crimean Tatars, a painful issue for a people deported under Stalin.
Putin made the comment in a meeting with Rustam Minnikhanov, the president of the Russian republic of Tatarstan on the Volga which is thousands of kilometres from Crimea but whose Tatar population are close ethnic kin of the Crimean Tatars.
Minnikhanov, who has travelled to Crimea after its annexation by Russia, asked Putin to consider the Crimean Tatars a "repressed people" subject to rehabilitation under an earlier Russian law.
"It would be nice if the Crimean Tatars were considered... under the 1991 law," Minnikhanov said. "It would be serious moral support to the Crimean Tatars."
Putin responded by saying that he will "certainly examine this" as well as consider meeting Crimean Tatar activists.
The Crimean Tatars, native inhabitants of the peninsula that was annexed by Russia last month, spent decades in Central Asia after Joseph Stalin ordered their banishment, ostensibly for Nazi collaboration.
They were allowed to move back in the late 1980s. But Ukraine never adopted the bill to rehabilitate the people, and Crimean Tatars are still battling with issues of land ownership, among others.
Russia in 1991 adopted a law to rehabilitate repressed people by proclaiming their persecution illegal and granting them the right to compensation and territorial integrity.
Putin has already made overtures to the Crimean Tatars, who were massively opposed to the referendum on March 16 that supported joining up with Russia and still often call Russia "occupants" of the peninsula.
Meanwhile: NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Tuesday said he could not confirm whether Russian troops had withdrawn from the Ukrainian border as announced by the Kremlin.
"Unfortunately I cannot confirm that Russia is withdrawing its troops; this is not what we have seen," Rasmussen told journalists before a NATO foreign ministers meeting on the crisis in Ukraine.
Ukraine and the United States have accused Russia of massing thousands of troops near the border and have expressed concern that Moscow intends to seize southeastern parts of Ukraine with large populations of ethnic Russians following the Crimea takeover.