Albeit by a thin margin, Crimea's population voted in favor of Ukraine's independence in 1991. As of March 27, 2024, it will have been ten years to the day that the Russian Federation annexed Crimea in an illegal military action that eventually led to the war in Ukraine.
Though no shots were fired, the "bloodless seizure" of the peninsula, which was also home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet and a popular vacation destination for Russian citizens, was a populist victory for Vladimir Putin in March 2014.
As was the case with past Russian Federation and Soviet leaders Nikita Kruschev, Boris Yeltsin, and Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin often relies on threats of nuclear escalation to cow the West while obtaining military objectives that are illegal according to international law.
While the European Union, NATO, and the United States debate on the next best moves to make, the Russian grip on the once-independent state of Crimea has only grown stronger with time.
Human rights have been systematically stripped away, and the Tatars, a Muslim ethnic minority with Turkic origins, have bore the brunt of the crackdowns.
"The situation is only getting worse," said human rights lawyer Emil Kurbedinov, himself a Crimean Tatar. "The cases of kidnapping, detention of people without trial in prisons, have increased, especially after 2022."
The Tatars have been traditional victims of Russian aggression dating back to Joseph Stalin, who forcefully deported Crimea's Tatar population in 1944.
But what was already common has become more frequent and more invasive since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The woman is Lutfiye Zudiyeva, a Crimean Tatar, and she shared video of the moment on her social media accounts.
"They came to my house to carry out a search," Crimean Tatar activist Lutfiye Zudiyeva told CNN in an interview from the occupied Ukrainian peninsula. "I had been preparing for it for years."
She had been arrested three times since 2019. This time it was over posts she made to social media.
According to the United Nations, the decade long occupation by Russia has been marked by the imposition of Russian laws and institutions, as well as the smothering of any opposing views, and serious human rights violations.
"There are arrests, searches, torture and repression," Zudiyeva said. "As soon as you try to publicly express your disagreement... or you somehow get involved, you become a target. It's inevitable."
The occupation of Crimea occurred not long after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, which kicked up pro-Russian sentiment in the region that was part of the Soviet Union until 1954 and already leaned more toward Moscow than Ukraine.
There are reportedly pockets of pro-Russia sentiment in the region, such as the port city of Sevastopol, but such pro-Russian fervor is not considered widespread.
