Former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak handed to President Vladimir Putin a list of 16 names of those she considers political prisoners. In this list there are the names of Ukrainian citizens Oleg Sentsov and Alexander Kolchenko, but there is not a single mention of the Crimean Tatar activists who, after the occupation of the peninsula, became the main target of the aggressor's repressions. And it says a lot, - Vitaly Portnikov writes in the column on "Crimea. Realities ".
Lists such as the list Sobchak - given the proximity of the former candidate to the entourage of Vladimir Putin and the president himself - are carefully, most likely, agreed to allow the authoritarian ruler to play a "good king" before another inauguration. And the fact that there are no Crimean Tatar names on the list can be regarded as evidence of the collective reluctance of the Russian elite and society to notice the essence of the colonial policy in the Crimea. Politicians, in which, in my opinion, Vladimir Putin is a worthy successor to Catherine II.
The second, according to the apt definition of Taras Shevchenko, "finished the widow-orphan". But not only Ukraine. The Empress also destroyed the civilization of the Crimean Tatar people, the barbaric colonization of the peninsula began. The results of this policy are well known. Like the unwillingness of the Russian state and society to recognize these results. Like the willingness of the authorities of the Russian Empire to act in the interests of the colonists, and the Russian Federation - in the interests of collaborators. Has anything changed in the "Russian world" from Catherine to Vladimir - a rhetorical question.
And the fact that in Russia around the Crimean Tatar activists is a real conspiracy of silence, and the fact that the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan had to interfere with the issue of the liberation of Akhtem Chiygoz and Ilmi Umerov - and Sobchak in his list is silent about their comrades, and that the overwhelming the majority of Russians can not understand in any way that the Crimea, no matter who decides on its fate whoever it is, is not the territory of Russia, but its unfortunate colony, says about the state of minds in Russia even more than the annexation of Crimea itself, the war in the Donbass and others about Kremlin ivopravnye action.
When Sobchak "forgets" about the Crimean Tatars or agrees to forget about them at the request of the well-wishers from the presidential administration, he involuntarily gives his own idea of ??the status of the peninsula. And this view differs little from the views of Putin, Navalny and other Russian politicians.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Join also the TSN group. Blogs on facebook and follow the updates of the section!.