Ukraine's Muslim Crimea Battalion Yearns for Lost Homeland | World News | US News - 0 views
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YASNOHORODKA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Standing amid the charred remains of a roadside hotel on a major highway near Kyiv, Isa Akayev explained what drove him to build his Muslim volunteer unit and fight for Ukraine.
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Many Tatars opposed Moscow's annexation of Crimea, which had followed the overthrow of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president amid mass street protests.Their suspicion of Moscow has deep roots. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimea's Tatars - Akayev’s grandparents among them - in 1944, accusing them of collaboration with Nazi Germany.They were only allowed to return with their descendants in the 1980s - as Akayev did from Uzbekistan in 1989 - and many welcomed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation.
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become a fully-fledged unit of Ukraine's army.Dozens of other volunteer battalions sprang up in 2014 and began helping Ukraine's unprepared regular army to fight in the Donbas. They included two Chechen units, a Georgian one, and several with a right-wing nationalist ethos. Some have since disarmed while others have joined the regular army.Russia has been scathing about such units. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on the eve of the war that providing shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to former volunteer battalions was evidence of a "militaristic psychosis".A Ukrainian presidential envoy said in March that such volunteer battalions now numbered more than 100. Ukraine's government celebrates them as heroes, celebrating their exploits on an annual volunteers' day.
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Moscow, which in 2016 banned the Mejlis, a body representing Crimean Tatars, rejected the report's findings. It says a March 2014 referendum legitimised its "incorporation" of Crimea.The Crimea battalion performed reconnaissance against Russian forces around Yasnohorodka, a village 25km west of Kyiv, and later in nearby Motyzhyn, Akayev said."The residents here were initially very scared when they saw us because they didn't know who we were. We had to shout 'we are Ukrainian'... then people started slowly coming out of their homes and they gave us tea."
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"We wanted to buy this place, to build a Crimean Tatar school and a mosque here... It didn’t come to anything, and then this happened," Akayev said, gesturing at the building’s charred remains which he said was the result of Russian shelling."I (still) dream about this project, but really I just want to return home to Crimea."