Things in Ukraine have started moving very quickly again.

Strikes on Kyiv are intensifying. Modi has publicly pushed Putin on ending the war. Putin is reportedly increasingly worried about what happens if he can’t claim some kind of victory in Donbas. And it feels like, politically and militarily, everything is accelerating at once.

Since I finished making this video, Zelensky has also issued an extraordinary warning that Russia’s own airspace could effectively begin closing as Ukrainian drone operations intensify. So I have a feeling the next few days are going to be very interesting.

In this video, I try to break down what has happened over the last 48 hours and, more importantly, what it might actually mean.

Gareth Jones in the early 1930s, alongside pages from his personal diary recording what he saw on his 1933 walk into famine-stricken Ukraine. Portrait and diary images courtesy of the Gareth Vaughan Jones archive, National Library of Wales and garethjones.org.

In March 1933, a twenty seven year old Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones arrived in Moscow with an official cover story. Through his connections to David Lloyd George (the former British Prime Minister, for whom Jones had worked as a foreign affairs adviser), he'd secured an invitation to visit a tractor factory in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the kind of sanctioned, chaperoned trip the Soviet authorities were happy to let a foreigner take.He never made it to the factory. Seventy miles short of Kharkiv, Jones got off the train.

For the next forty miles, he walked. No official guide. No government minder. No permission, in fact, since leaving the approved route wasn’t something foreigners were supposed to do. He passed through roughly twenty villages and collective farms on foot, and at each one he stopped, and looked, and wrote down what he saw.

He walked through villages that had stopped functioning as villages. He walked past frozen fields that should have been full of grain and weren’t. He was walking through Soviet Ukraine, one of the regions hit hardest, and he wrote down exactly what he found there. He talked to peasants who told him, again and again, the same thing. He wrote it down almost exactly as he heard it, village after village, and it became the line his reporting is remembered for.

“We have no bread. We are dying.”

That was it. That was the whole horror, in seven words, repeated by every mouth he passed. All of it. Every starving face, every empty barn, every official denial he was fed by the men in Moscow who wanted him to believe nothing was wrong. Then he did something almost nobody else in his position was willing to do.

He put his name on it.

On 29 March 1933, Jones stood in front of reporters in Berlin and told the world what he’d seen. Millions of people, he said, were being starved to death, not by drought, not by bad luck, but by policy. Whether Stalin specifically targeted Ukraine, or Ukraine simply bore the worst of a famine sweeping the Soviet Union, is still argued over by historians today. What isn’t argued over is who was dying, and how many, and that the world was being told nothing was wrong.

Soviet officials confiscate grain from a peasant household in Ukraine, 1932 to 1933. Image: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, via NPR.

He was right.

Historians now put the death toll at somewhere between five and seven million people. It’s one of the great engineered atrocities of the twentieth century, and Gareth Jones was the man who told the West it was happening, under his own name, while it was still happening.

You’d think that would make him famous. It made him a target instead.

Decades later, the historian Timothy Snyder pointed out that almost no one who suspected mass death was happening in Ukraine said so clearly, in public, under their own name. Jones did. Snyder identifies only one other English-language journalist willing to do the same at the time, Malcolm Muggeridge, and even he published anonymously in the Manchester Guardian, too cautious to risk his byline on it. But Muggeridge did write, in his own words, that the famine was "one of the most monstrous crimes in history."

Two men. One with his name on it, one without. Everyone else in the Western press either didn’t know, didn’t say, or actively said the opposite.

Because two thousand kilometres away, in a comfortable office in Moscow, sat a man who had a very different story to tell, and a very good reason to keep telling it.

Walter Duranty, photographed in 1936 at a luncheon held in his honour in New York, alongside the page in Gareth Jones's diary recording a conversation with Duranty over Soviet gold and silver prices. Photo: John Rooney/AP, via NPR. Diary page courtesy of garethjones.org.

His name was Walter Duranty, and he was the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. He had access. He had status. He had, by 1933, already won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Soviet Union, awarded to him the year before Jones went public.

And Duranty knew exactly what Jones had seen, because Duranty had seen it too.

Privately, he told a British diplomat that as many as ten million people might be dead. He knew the number. He knew the scale.

Publicly, he wrote something else entirely.

Days after Jones’s Berlin press conference, Duranty published a piece in the Times naming him directly. He allowed that Jones had a “keen and active mind,” then dismissed his eyewitness account as “a rather inadequate cross-section of a big country.” He’d tried to talk Jones out of his conclusions himself, Duranty wrote, but “nothing could shake his conviction of impending doom.” The headline over the whole thing said the rest: “Russians Hungry But Not Starving.”

In the same piece, defending the human cost of Stalin’s policies, Duranty offered the line he’s remembered for above all others: “To put it brutally, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

He knew it was a lie when he wrote it. He wrote it anyway, because the truth would have cost him his access, his standing, and his relationship with the Soviet officials who let him keep working.

This is the part of the story that should make you angry, and it should. Duranty didn’t just fail to report the famine. He actively worked to discredit the one man who did. He used his platform, his prestige, and his Pulitzer to bury a colleague who’d done the harder, riskier, more honest job.

And it worked. The world believed the man with the byline at the New York Times over the freelance Welsh reporter nobody had heard of. Jones was frozen out. Other correspondents in Moscow, terrified of losing their own visas, fell in line behind Duranty’s denial rather than risk backing Jones. The famine kept killing people, and most of the West simply stopped listening to the man telling them it was happening.

Jones’s career never recovered the way it should have. Two years later, in August 1935, he was in Inner Mongolia reporting on the Japanese occupation of Manchuria when bandits captured him and his travelling companion, a German journalist named Herbert Müller. Müller was released within two days. Jones was held, moved twice, and shot dead on 12 August, the day before his thirtieth birthday.

Decades later, declassified British intelligence files revealed who Müller actually was. He’d been an NKVD agent since at least 1917, tracked by British security services for over three decades under multiple aliases. The German transport firm that arranged the pair’s route through the region wasn’t a real company. It was a front for Soviet military intelligence. Some historians still argue the Japanese were behind the killing rather than Moscow. But the man who walked free after two days was a Soviet spy, and the company that sent them both into bandit country answered to the Red Army’s intelligence directorate. Draw your own conclusion.

He died a day before turning thirty, having told the truth about one of the worst atrocities of his century, largely forgotten by the world he’d tried to warn.

David Lloyd George, his old employer and friend, said afterward that he had “always been afraid that he would take one risk too many.”

None of this ended in 1933. The reporter who goes and looks is still, usually, just one person. The institution that decides what to print still has more to lose from the truth than from the silence. That calculation hasn’t changed in ninety years, it’s just wearing different names.

Walter Duranty never apologised. He never retracted a word of his denial. He kept his Pulitzer Prize until the day he died, and the Pulitzer board, petitioned for decades by historians, journalists, and Gareth Jones’s own family to revoke it, has never done so. It’s still there. Still recognised. Still sitting in the record as an honour, not a warning.

Even people who knew him had no illusions about what he was. Malcolm Muggeridge, who’d been in Moscow at the same time and seen the same famine, said it plainly decades later: Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist that I ever met in fifty years of journalism.”

Sit with that for a second. The man who told the truth was killed within two years and forgotten for eighty. The man who called him a liar to protect his own access kept his prize forever.

This isn’t ancient history dressed up as a lesson. This is the oldest story in journalism, repeating itself in every generation that lets it. Someone goes and looks. Someone else, comfortable and connected, decides the truth is inconvenient and calls the person who found it a fraud instead. And too often, the institution with the bigger platform wins that argument, at least for a while.

Gareth Jones won it eventually. It just took the better part of a century, a body of archival research, a 2019 film, and a great many people deciding his name was worth saying out loud again.

This trilingual plaque, in Welsh, English, and Ukrainian, was unveiled on 2 May 2006 in the Quadrangle of the Old College, Aberystwyth University, Wales.

That’s the whole reason to tell this story now. Not because it’s a neat piece of 1930s history, but because the pattern it describes never actually went away. The people willing to walk into the story and report what they find are still out there. So are the people who’d rather they didn’t.

It’s worth noticing which kind of journalism came out of this looking right. Jones had no institution behind him. No editor, no bureau, no expense account, no relationship with Moscow to protect. He had a notebook, a pair of boots, and nothing to lose by telling the truth. Duranty had all the things Jones didn’t, and every one of them became a reason to lie. Ninety years on, that’s still roughly the trade being made. Independence costs a reporter almost everything except their credibility. Institutional access buys comfort at the price of it. History, so far, has only ever settled that argument in one direction, it’s just slow about it.

Gareth Jones chose to walk. That choice cost him almost everything, and it turned out, in the end, to be the only thing that mattered.

Sources

Gareth Jones’s diaries and published articles, National Library of Wales and garethjones.org (Nigel Linsan Colley archive)

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

David Folkenflik, “The New York Times can’t shake the cloud over a 90-year-old Pulitzer Prize,” NPR, 8 May 2022

BBC News Wales, interview with Philip Colley on Gareth Jones’s legacy, 2025

Wikipedia, “Gareth Jones (journalist)” and “Walter Duranty”

I’ve watched the front move closer to Kramatorsk for three and a half years, but it is still difficult to comprehend what is happening to this place.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from energy workers in Donbas asking if I wanted to come and film how they are keeping the lights on as the fighting gets closer. I couldn’t say no. So I packed the car and headed east.

I wanted this film to be about more than the front line.

I wanted to show what Kramatorsk actually feels like right now. A city preparing for something everyone knows is coming, while thousands of ordinary people continue going to work, repairing things, opening shops, driving buses, making coffee and somehow keeping the place alive.

My friend April, a soldier with the 93rd Brigade who has lived in Kramatorsk for the past two years, takes me back into the city.

Almost immediately, it feels different.

On the road in, a petrol station we were about to stop at was hit by a drone moments before we arrived. At the power station, workers are trying to keep electricity flowing while drones circle overhead and strikes repeatedly damage the machinery they have spent their lives maintaining.

And yet life continues.

That is really what this film became about.

Not simply soldiers or weapons or maps showing another Russian advance, but the people who wake up every morning and make the decision to stay. The people keeping the lights on while everyone else sleeps. The people reopening a petrol station two days after it was hit. The people watching another summer evening over a city they love, knowing how uncertain the next one may be.

There is surprisingly little reporting from inside Kramatorsk showing what everyday life there actually looks like at this moment, even as Russian forces put increasing pressure on the area. I wanted to document it while I still could.

I’m already planning to go back.

Winter is coming, and the next few months are going to be incredibly important for the people who remain there.

If you watched this far, I have two very small favours to ask.

Please leave a comment. It genuinely helps these films reach more people, and I read far more of them than you probably imagine.

And if you haven’t already, please consider subscribing. It really does mean a lot.

This channel is completely independent. I take no government funding, no billionaire backing and no sponsorship money. The reason I can keep travelling to places like this and making these films is because people watch them and because some of you choose to support my work directly on Patreon.

If you would like to help me keep doing genuinely independent reporting from Ukraine, you can find my Patreon below.

Thank you, genuinely, for watching.

I’ll see you in the next one.

Help me make the next film: https://caolan.report/support/

My other links: https://linktr.ee/CaolanRobertson

Left: Fridtjof Nansen arriving by train during his relief mission to Ukraine, 1922. National Library of Norway. Public domain. Right: Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre arrives by train at Kyiv railway station, 23 August 2026, his 65th birthday, bringing Norway’s commitment of 9.2 billion dollars in support for Ukraine. Photo: Oleksandr Techynskyi / Norway’s Embassy in Kyiv.

Yesterday, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre stood in Kyiv beside President Zelenskyy and announced that Norway will give Ukraine another 9.2 billion dollars in 2027. The money will be delivered through a programme called the Nansen Support Programme for Ukraine.

Almost nobody outside Norway knows who Nansen was. They should.

He crossed Greenland on skis. He almost reached the North Pole. He invented the modern refugee passport. He saved seven million people from starvation. And the Norwegian Prime Minister standing in Kyiv yesterday was delivering aid through a programme that bears his name, because what Nansen did for Ukraine a century ago has never been forgotten in Norway, even if the rest of the world forgot it entirely.

This is his story.

THE EXPLORER

Most people who have heard of Nansen know him as a polar explorer, if they know him at all.

Left: Fridtjof Nansen, c. 1890s (Library of Congress). Right: Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen depart the Fram, 14 March 1895, on their attempt to reach the North Pole.

In 1888, aged twenty-six, he led the first crossing of Greenland’s ice cap on skis. Nobody had done it before. Most people who attempted it died. Nansen and his team did it in six weeks, hauling sledges across hundreds of miles of ice in temperatures that dropped to minus forty.

In 1893 he sailed north on a specially built ship called the Fram, deliberately letting it get locked in Arctic ice, planning to drift toward the North Pole over three years. When the drift was not going far enough north, he left the ship with one companion and skied toward the pole, reaching a latitude of 86 degrees north, further than any human being had ever been. He turned back only because he had to, knowing that going further meant dying.

He came home a hero. Crowds lined the streets of Christiania, now Oslo. He was the most famous Norwegian alive.

He could have spent the rest of his life giving lectures and accepting honours.

He did not.

The Fram leaving Bergen, 1893, at the start of Nansen's attempt to drift across the polar ice to the North Pole. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

THE TURN

After Norwegian independence from Sweden in 1905, Nansen became a diplomat. He served as Norway’s first ambassador to London. He helped negotiate Norwegian membership of the League of Nations. And when the League needed someone to take on its most difficult, most thankless humanitarian tasks, they kept asking Nansen.

In 1920 he repatriated 427,000 prisoners of war, men stranded in camps across Russia and Germany years after the fighting had stopped, moving them home across a continent that was still barely functioning. He did it with almost no budget, using personal contacts and sheer force of will, receiving no salary for any of it.

Then came Ukraine.

THE FAMINE

By the summer of 1921 something catastrophic was happening across the southern regions of the former Russian Empire. Ukraine, the Volga region, the Caucasus. The breadbasket of Europe was starving.

It was not simply a natural disaster. Ukraine had always been one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world. But between 1918 and 1921, three armies had moved across it in succession, each requisitioning food from peasants at gunpoint. The new Bolshevik government had imposed a grain tax so heavy that farmers had nothing left to eat. In 1921 drought hit the weakened land. The result was catastrophic.

By the time foreign organisations were allowed in, people were dying in the streets. Children were dying of starvation in numbers that nobody had a reliable count for. In Zaporizhzhia province alone, by early 1922, an estimated 900,000 of the province’s 1,288,000 residents were without food.

The Soviet government had denied the famine for as long as it could. Admitting it meant admitting failure, and admitting failure meant asking the capitalist West for help, which was ideologically intolerable. It was only in August 1921 that Lenin finally allowed foreign aid organisations in.

The International Red Cross turned immediately to the only man they believed could navigate the impossible politics of the situation.

They asked Fridtjof Nansen to take charge.

He was sixty years old. He said yes.

Famine refugees in southern Russia and Ukraine, 1921. Hundreds of families with horse-drawn carts and makeshift shelters, stretching to the horizon. This is what Nansen arrived to find. National Library of Norway. Public domain.

THE POLITICS

Getting food to starving people sounds simple. It was not.

Western governments were deeply suspicious of anything that might be seen as legitimising Lenin’s regime. The argument was made, openly, in the chambers of the League of Nations and in the press, that feeding Soviet Russia was helping the Bolsheviks consolidate power. Better to let the famine run its course and weaken the communist government.

Nansen went to the League of Nations and said, in plain language, what he thought of that argument.

Standing before the assembly on 30 September 1921, he said: “In the USA, wheat is rotting among farmers who cannot find buyers for surplus grain. In Argentina, such a quantity of corn has been collected that there is nowhere to put it, and it is already being used as fuel for steam locomotives. And in Russia, twenty million people are starving.”

He asked for funding. He was refused.

He went back to Europe and raised the money privately, from charities, from governments that would listen, from ordinary people who read about what was happening and sent what they could. He built a coalition of European relief organisations and put himself at the head of it.

A hundred years later, Ukrainians are doing the same thing themselves. Crowdfunding drones. Raising money for armour and ambulances and generators from ordinary people around the world, because waiting for institutions has never been fast enough.

Some things do not change.

The Nansen mission reached around 400,000 people in Ukraine directly. But in the provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv, where the Soviet government had delayed allowing foreign aid the longest, his relief effort became the difference between life and death for tens of thousands of people who would have received nothing otherwise.

Each standard food parcel delivered by the mission contained 7 kilograms of flour, four tins of condensed milk, one kilogram each of lard and sugar, and 40 grams of tea. It cost two US dollars. In Kharkiv alone, Nansen’s organisation opened two canteens for students, each feeding a thousand people a day. Professors received food parcels and academic supplies. In Mykolaiv, 22 food distribution points operated across the region by August 1922.

Children being fed at a Nansen mission relief station, Ukraine, 1921-22. Photo: Nobel Prize Outreach / NobelPrize.org. Public domain.

THE MAN HE SENT

Here is the detail that stops everyone who hears it.

Nansen needed a representative on the ground in Ukraine. Someone to travel the famine regions, document what he saw, negotiate with Soviet officials, and report back. He chose a young Norwegian army officer named Vidkun Quisling.

Quisling headed the Ukrainian office of the mission from Kharkiv, with sub-offices in Mykolaiv and Odesa. He spent months travelling through Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kharkiv. He sent detailed telegrams to Nansen describing what he saw. From Zaporizhzhia on 25 February 1922: “The situation is terrible. Of the province’s 1,288,000 inhabitants, 900,000 are without food. Sixty percent of the famished are children.”

He filed some of the most detailed and accurate reports on the Ukrainian famine of any foreign observer.

Twenty years later, Vidkun Quisling became the head of the Norwegian Nazi collaborationist government during the German occupation. His name became a word in several languages, synonymous with traitor.

The man who documented Ukraine’s starvation in 1922 became the most reviled figure in Norwegian history by 1945.

History does not simplify easily.

THE PRIZE

On 10 December 1922, Fridtjof Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Nansen in later life, and the telegram that reached him at the Palace Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne on 29 November 1922: the Nobel Committee informing him, in confidence, that he'd won that year's Peace Prize, and asking him to come to Kristiania to receive it on 10 December. His handwritten reply is visible below it. (Photo: Bundesarchiv / telegram: Nobel Prize Outreach, NobelPrize.org)

The Nobel committee was not honouring Ukraine specifically. The prize recognised the whole of Nansen's relief work: the repatriation of prisoners of war, the resettlement of refugees scattered across a broken Europe, and his efforts for Greek and Armenian refugees driven from Asia Minor. In 1922 he organised an exchange of 1.25 million Greeks and half a million Turks caught on the wrong side of a new border after the Greco-Turkish War. In 1925 the League sent him to Soviet Armenia to find land for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, tasking him with assessing a plan to irrigate desert near Yerevan and settle refugees there. The League never fully funded it, but Nansen secured Nansen passports for tens of thousands of Armenians and helped repatriate close to 7,000 people to a home in Soviet Armenia. Armenia has not forgotten. The country has issued postage stamps in his honour twice, in 1996 and again for his 150th birth anniversary in 2011.

In his acceptance lecture he said: “When one has stood face to face with famine, with death by starvation itself, then surely one should have had one’s eyes opened to the full extent of this misfortune.”

He spent part of the prize money establishing two model agricultural stations to test modern farming methods, one in Ukraine and one in the Volga region of Russia. The Ukraine station, at Mikhailovka village in Katerynoslav province, now Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, provided local peasants with machinery and seed grain to restart production on land that had been stripped bare. Forty-five American tractors were imported. It became a model farm and training centre for Ukrainian agronomists, the first time modern mechanised agriculture had been introduced to the region on that scale.

He also built and supplied an orphanage in Kharkiv for children who had survived the famine but had nobody left. He visited it himself, going from child to child to check that the food was adequate, that the conditions were bearable, that the money was reaching the people it was meant for.

Children photographed outside Children’s House No.1, Ukrainian SSR, during the famine relief period. Many are holding documents, likely food ration cards. These are the children the Nansen mission was feeding in Kharkiv. National Library of Norway. Public domain.

THE PASSPORT

Nansen’s other great legacy from this period has outlasted everything else.

After the Russian Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people were stateless. They had fled, or been expelled, from countries that no longer existed in the form they had known. They had no legal identity. No country recognised them. They could not travel, work legally, or access any of the protections that citizenship provides.

In 1922, Nansen created a document for them. A certificate of identity, bearing his signature, recognised by 52 countries, that allowed stateless people to cross borders, find work, and build lives. It was called the Nansen passport.

Among those who used it: Igor Stravinsky. Sergei Rachmaninov. Marc Chagall. Aristotle Onassis. Thousands of Ukrainians fleeing Bolshevik repression.

The Nansen passport is the direct ancestor of the modern travel document issued by the UNHCR to refugees today. Every refugee travel document in use anywhere in the world traces its lineage back to a piece of paper Nansen designed in 1922.

A Nansen passport alongside the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The direct line runs from Nansen’s 1922 invention to the foundation of modern international refugee law. Photo: Nobel Prize Outreach / NobelPrize.org. Public domain.

THE SECOND NOBEL

Nansen died on 13 May 1930, at his home outside Oslo, at his desk, working. He was 68 years old. He was buried on 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day. The country stopped to mark its independence and buried the man who had given that independence its greatest meaning on the same afternoon.

Eight years later, in 1938, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded again. This time to the Nansen International Office for Refugees, established after his death to carry on his work. The citation was for “having carried on the work of Fridtjof Nansen to the benefit of refugees across Europe.” It is the closest the Nobel committee has ever come to awarding the same prize twice for the same cause.

In 1954, UNHCR created the Nansen Refugee Award in his name. The first recipient was Eleanor Roosevelt, first chair of the UN Human Rights Commission. The award is still given annually today, to individuals and organisations showing exceptional dedication to refugees, the stateless and the displaced.

One man. Three Nobel connections. A legacy that has now run for over a century.

THE ECHO

Yesterday, 23 August 2026, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre stood in Kyiv on Ukraine’s Flag Day alongside Zelenskyy and leaders from Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He announced that Norway will maintain its support for Ukraine at 9.2 billion dollars in 2027. He inspected damage from Russian strikes. He condemned attacks on civilian infrastructure.

The money, as it has been since 2022, will be delivered through the Nansen Support Programme for Ukraine.

The connection is deliberate. A century ago, Nansen went to Ukraine when Western governments refused to help, raised money when institutions failed, stood in front of the League of Nations and pointed out that there was grain rotting in Argentina while twenty million people starved. Norway’s modern programme was named after him explicitly because what he did then and what Norway does now are the same act: showing up when it matters, not when it is convenient.

Støre said in Kyiv yesterday: “Russia has no remorse when it comes to distinguishing between civilian and military targets. It is precisely civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools and hospitals that have suffered, which is a systematic violation of international law.”

Nansen said something similar in Geneva in 1921. Different words. The same truth. The same country on the same side.

The question Nansen faced, which is whether the politics of Western governments will allow them to help Ukraine or whether strategic calculation will override humanitarian obligation, is the same question being asked in every European capital right now.

Nansen already answered it. He answered it by going anyway.

Norway is still going.

Sources: Nobel Prize Outreach, “Fridtjof Nansen biographical,” nobelprize.org; National Library of Norway, Nansen photo archive, nb.no; D.V. Arkhireyskyi, “Fridtjof Nansen and Ukraine,” Suchasni doslidzhennia z nimetskoi istorii, 2019; UNHCR, “His efforts saved seven million lives,” unhcr.org/ua; Norwegian Government, “The Nansen Support Programme for Ukraine,” regjeringen.no; Reuters, “Norway to give over $9 billion to Ukraine in 2027,” 23 August 2026; Kyiv Post, “Nordic leaders arrive in Kyiv,” 23 August 2026; NordiskPost, “Nordic leaders in Kyiv as Ukraine asks for more air defence,” 23 August 2026; Fram Museum, “Fridtjof Nansen 1861-1930,” frammuseum.no.

Anti-annexation street art photographed on Pokrovka Street, Moscow, 2014. Crimea shaped as the cheese on a mousetrap. The message: Russia’s promises of protection and prosperity were the bait. The trap was already set. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In 1783 Catherine the Great took Crimea with a manifesto. In 1944 Stalin emptied it with cattle wagons. In February 2014, soldiers in unmarked uniforms walked onto the streets and nobody fired a shot. The third theft was the quietest. It was also the most consequential.

Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series covered two and a half centuries of Russian behaviour toward Crimea and its people. Catherine’s annexation. The Crimean War. Stalin’s deportation. The pattern was always the same. A pretext. A promise of protection. And then erasure.

By 2014, that pattern was about to repeat for the third time. And this time, the world was watching.

THE MOMENT PUTIN CHOSE

To understand what happened in February 2014, you have to understand what was happening in Kyiv.

Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych had spent months promising to sign an association agreement with the European Union, an agreement that would have moved Ukraine closer to Europe and further from Russia’s orbit. In November 2013 he abruptly reversed course under pressure from Moscow and refused to sign. Ukrainians took to the streets.

What followed was three months of protests on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square. The Euromaidan. At its height, hundreds of thousands of people stood in the snow demanding a European future for their country. In February 2014, government snipers opened fire on protesters. Over a hundred people were killed. Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Putin watched all of this and made a decision.

He later admitted in a documentary that he personally gave the order to begin work on “returning Crimea” on the night of 22 to 23 February 2014, the night Yanukovych fled. The operation had been planned. It was waiting for the right moment. The fall of a pro-Russian government in Kyiv was that moment.

THE LITTLE GREEN MEN

Russian troops without insignia at Perevalne military base, Crimea, March 2014. Professional soldiers, moving with military precision, using the latest military equipment. Russia initially denied they were Russian. Putin later admitted he had personally ordered the operation. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

On the night of 26 to 27 February 2014, armed men in unmarked green uniforms seized the Crimean parliament building and the Council of Ministers in Simferopol. They raised Russian and Crimean flags. They had no insignia. No unit markings. No identification of any kind.

At the same time, other units secured Simferopol airport and Sevastopol airport. Roads into Crimea from mainland Ukraine were blocked. Armed checkpoints appeared across the peninsula overnight.

Russia denied they were Russian soldiers.

Vladimir Putin stood in front of cameras and said the men were local self-defence forces who had bought their uniforms in shops. He called them, with a straight face, “polite people.”

The world knew exactly what it was looking at. These were professional soldiers, moving with military precision, using military equipment, securing military objectives in a sequence that had clearly been planned well in advance. They were not men who had bought uniforms in shops.

Putin later admitted, in the same 2014 documentary, that he had personally ordered Russian special forces to begin the operation. “We had to start working on returning Crimea to Russia,” he said.

The first thing they secured was not a government building. It was the naval base at Sevastopol.

Two hundred and thirty one years after Catherine built it. One hundred and fifty eight years after the Treaty of Paris stripped it away. Fifty eight years after the Soviet Union transferred Crimea to Ukraine. The port came first. It always comes first.

Military map showing the full Russian operation across Crimea, February to March 2014. Red circles mark Ukrainian military bases blocked and seized by Russian forces, with dates. The operation ran simultaneously across the entire peninsula. Top: Kherson Oblast, mainland Ukraine. Right: Russia. Source: Maps of Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE REFERENDUM

With Russian troops controlling the peninsula, the newly installed Crimean authorities announced a referendum on the status of Crimea. It was scheduled for 16 March 2014, two weeks away. No independent international observers were invited. Ukrainian and Tatar media were taken off air.

Before the vote could take place, the Ukrainian military had to be dealt with.

Letter from the Council of Ministers of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, dated 9 March 2014, addressed to the commander of the 55th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment. It orders Ukrainian troops to disarm, surrender all weapons to Russian Black Sea Fleet forces, and transfer control of their base before the referendum. It ends: “I guarantee the safety of every serviceman who surrenders his weapons.” Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The ballot paper offered two choices: join Russia, or restore the 1992 constitution that had declared Crimea a republic within Ukraine. Remaining part of Ukraine as it currently existed was not an option on the ballot.

The official ballot paper for the 16 March 2014 referendum, printed in Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar. Two options: join Russia, or restore the 1992 constitution. Remaining part of Ukraine under its current constitution was not offered. The referendum was held under military occupation with no independent international observers. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Russian propaganda billboard in Sevastopol, March 2014. The text reads: “16 March, we choose.” Left option: Crimea shown as a swastika on a black background wrapped in barbed wire. Right option: Crimea coloured in the Russian flag. This was the choice Russia offered. Photo: TASS.

The result, announced two days later, was 96.77 percent in favour of joining Russia. Turnout was reported at 83 percent.

Independent analysts and leaked documents suggested the actual result was far lower. A leaked report from the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council put the vote for joining Russia at somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, with turnout around 30 to 50 percent.

It did not matter. Two days after the result was announced, Putin signed the treaty incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring the referendum invalid. 100 countries voted in favour. 11 voted against. 58 abstained.

The west imposed sanctions. Russia kept Crimea.

Vladimir Putin signs the treaty incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation, 18 March 2014, alongside the installed Crimean leadership. Two weeks earlier, Russian troops had been on the streets with no insignia. Now the paperwork was done. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE TATARS KNEW

The Crimean Tatars understood what had happened before almost anyone else did.

Mustafa Dzhemilev, who had spent fifteen years in Soviet prisons fighting for the right to exist on his own land, watched Russian soldiers secure Simferopol and said: “We have seen this before.”

The Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar representative assembly, voted immediately to oppose the annexation and support Ukrainian territorial integrity. They organised peaceful protests. They refused to participate in the referendum.

Russia’s response was methodical and familiar.

In 2016, Russian authorities banned the Mejlis entirely, designating it an extremist organisation. The same body that had fought for fifty years to bring the Tatar people home from Soviet exile was now, under Russian occupation, a terrorist organisation. Tatar language broadcasting was shut down. Tatar language schools were closed or converted to Russian language instruction. ATR, the main Crimean Tatar television channel, was forced to relocate to Kyiv.

The pattern that Catherine began in 1783, that Stalin accelerated in 1944, continued without pause.

Crimean Tatar memorial gathering on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, 18 May 2016. The banner reads: “Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People.” The dates 18 May 1944 and 20 February 2014 appear side by side. Seventy years apart. The same people. The same pattern. The banners on the left show the faces of those who disappeared under occupation. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE WAVES

What followed the annexation was not a single act of repression. It came in waves.

Crimea SOS, the Ukrainian human rights organisation that has tracked the occupation since 2014, documented at least 66 forced disappearances in Crimea since Russia took control. Their analysts identified four distinct waves.

The first wave ran from March to May 2014, the period when the occupation was being established. At least 25 pro-Ukrainian activists disappeared. Among them was Reshat Ametov, a Crimean Tatar who staged a one-man protest in Simferopol. Twelve days later he was found dead with signs of extensive torture. Five other pro-Ukrainian activists from this period, including Valeriy Vashchuk, Ivan Bondarets, Vasyl Chernysh, Timur Shaimardanov and Seyran Zinedinov, have never been found.

The second wave came in the autumn of 2014 and targeted mostly Crimean Tatars. Among those who disappeared were the son and nephew of Abdurashit Dzhepparov, a veteran of the Crimean Tatar national movement. More than ten years later, their whereabouts remain unknown.

The third wave ran from August 2015 to May 2016 and again fell heaviest on the Tatar community. On the evening of 24 May 2016, Ervin Ibragimov, a Mejlis activist, was abducted in Bakhchysarai. Surveillance cameras captured the moment: two men, one in a law enforcement uniform, dragged him from his car, forced him into a minibus and drove away. His car was found abandoned on the street. The Russian controlled Investigative Committee opened a case, suspended it in 2017, and cited the impossibility of identifying perpetrators who had been filmed committing the crime. Ervin Ibragimov has never been found. In March 2026, his mother died under occupation without ever learning what happened to her son.

The fourth wave began with Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and expanded beyond Crimea into the occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Dozens of people were abducted and held in detention facilities in Crimea. The most recent documented victim was Edie Muslimova, editor of a Crimean Tatar children’s magazine, abducted on 21 November 2024. When the case became public, she was released.

Of the 66 documented disappearances: 21 people remain missing. Six were found dead. Seven have been charged with crimes. Thirty one were released within days of being taken.

At least 66 forced disappearances have been documented in Crimea since Russia’s occupation began in 2014. Source: Crimea SOS. krymsos.com

These are not wartime casualties. These are people who disappeared from their homes, their cars, their streets, in a territory Russia claimed it had peacefully liberated.

EIGHT YEARS OF OCCUPATION

Between 2014 and 2022, the world mostly looked away.

Sanctions were imposed but not tightened. Diplomatic protests were filed. Summits were held. The language of de-escalation and dialogue filled communiques that changed nothing on the ground.

In Crimea, the occupation bedded in. Russian citizens were moved onto the peninsula in large numbers. Ukrainian property law was replaced with Russian law. Ukrainian currency was replaced with the rouble. Ukrainian passports were replaced with Russian ones, often by force. Refusing a Russian passport meant losing access to employment, healthcare and education.

The military buildup was systematic and enormous. Sevastopol was expanded and modernised. The Black Sea Fleet was reinforced. New missile systems were installed on the peninsula capable of striking targets across the entire Black Sea region and beyond. A bridge was built across the Kerch Strait connecting Crimea to mainland Russia, removing the peninsula’s geographic isolation and creating a direct land and rail link to Russian territory.

NATO watched. Intelligence agencies tracked. Reports were written.

And Putin kept building.

Russian Victory Day parade in Simferopol, Crimea, 2019. Five years into occupation, Russian military marches through Crimea’s capital with Russian flags. The same streets where Catherine’s manifesto was proclaimed in 1783. The same city whose name Russia changed from Aqmescit after the first annexation. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE LAUNCHPAD

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched the largest land invasion in Europe since the Second World War. Its targets were Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and a dozen other Ukrainian cities simultaneously.

The southern axis of that invasion came from Crimea.

Russian forces drove north from the peninsula into Kherson Oblast within hours of the invasion beginning. They reached the outskirts of Kherson city by the end of the first day. The same roads that Catherine’s settlers had used to move into Crimea in the 18th century were now being used to drive tanks in the opposite direction.

The Black Sea Fleet, operating from Sevastopol, launched cruise missiles into Ukrainian cities from the first night of the war. The same naval base that Russia had fought the Crimean War to keep, that it had rebuilt after the Treaty of Paris stripped it away, that Putin’s soldiers had secured before anything else in February 2014, was now the platform from which Russia was trying to destroy Ukraine.

Crimea had not just been taken. It had been turned into a weapon.

The Ukrainian military understood this from the start. Throughout 2022 and 2023, Ukrainian forces systematically targeted Russian military infrastructure in Crimea: the Kerch Bridge, twice damaged by Ukrainian strikes. The Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, struck by Ukrainian missiles. Russian air defence systems, ammunition depots, and command posts across the peninsula, hit by drones and long range weapons.

Russia had spent eight years turning Crimea into an unsinkable aircraft carrier. Ukraine spent the following years proving it was not unsinkable.

WHERE THE STORY ENDS

This series began in 1783, with Catherine the Great signing a manifesto in St Petersburg that nobody in Crimea was asked to approve. It ends here, at the moment the consequences of that manifesto, and everything that followed it, became a full scale war in the heart of Europe.

The third theft of Crimea made the 2022 invasion possible. The naval base, the land bridge, the missile systems, the eight years of military buildup while the world negotiated and filed protests and held summits, all of it fed directly into 24 February 2022.

Russia took Crimea three times. Each time with a different method. Each time with the same justification: protection, rescue, reluctant intervention on behalf of people who had not asked for help. Each time followed by erasure, demographic replacement and the patient work of making the land look like it was always Russian.

Catherine renamed the streets. Stalin emptied them. Putin filled them with soldiers and called them polite.

What none of them has ever managed, across two hundred and forty one years of trying, is to make Crimea Russian in any way that does not require force to maintain.

The Crimean Tatars are still there. Diminished, persecuted, surveilled, their leadership in exile, their language under pressure. Still there.

The war that Russia started from Crimea in 2022 is still being fought. Its outcome will determine whether Crimea remains a stolen peninsula or becomes, finally, what it has always been: Ukrainian territory, home to a people who were there long before Russia arrived and who have refused, across two and a half centuries of pressure, to disappear.

That is not history yet. That is now.

And that is where this series ends.

The Ukrainian checkpoint at Kalanchak, photographed before Russia's full scale invasion in 2022. It marked the de facto border between Ukrainian Kherson Oblast and Russian-occupied Crimea. A border that should never have existed, between a country and its own peninsula. Since February 2022, even this crossing is gone. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Sources: Vladimir Putin documentary “Crimea: The Road Back to the Motherland,” Rossiya 1, 2015; UN General Assembly Resolution 68/262, March 2014; Human Rights Watch, “Crimea: Tatar Community Under Pressure,” 2014; Amnesty International, “Crimea: One Year On, Human Rights Deteriorating,” 2015; Crimea SOS, “At Least 66 Victims of Forced Disappearances in Crimea,” krymsos.com; Euromaidan Press, “A Year After Prominent Activist Was Kidnapped in Crimea, Nobody Knows If He Is Alive,” 2017; BBC News, “Crimea profile,” 2022; Reuters, “Russia’s Black Sea Fleet: history and significance,” 2022; Euromaidan Press, “Eight years of Russian occupation: what happened to Crimea,” 2022; Ukrainian Institute of National Memory; International Crisis Group, “Russia and the Separatists in Eastern Ukraine,” 2016.

Russia wanted a long war. Ukraine is making that war increasingly expensive and increasingly difficult to keep away from ordinary Russian life. Wildberries warehouses are burning, Russian logistics are being hit deep inside the country, and Ukrainian drones are reaching places Moscow once treated as completely safe. TV Host Nataliia Lutsenko ‪@Notjustpolitics24‬ and Caolan Robertson, Irish journalist, documentary filmmaker, discussed the latest news surrounding the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian army made a long, successful campaign, especially during July. What is your take on everything with that strikes that are happening, and do you think that Ukraine can even increase those attacks from what you know?

The war in Ukraine looks completely different today from the one that began four and a half years ago.

Drones now shape almost everything on the battlefield. Armies are being rebuilt around them. Technology that once took years to develop can now become obsolete in weeks.

One of the people at the centre of that transformation has been Mykhailo Fedorov.

Then, seemingly at the worst possible moment, while Ukraine was carrying out some of its most ambitious technological operations against Russia, political turmoil erupted around the government and Fedorov suddenly found himself at the centre of it.

And, to be completely honest, I found the whole thing incredibly confusing.

There was endless commentary about what had happened, rumours about his relationship with Zelensky, speculation about whether he would leave government entirely, move into private defence, go abroad, or simply disappear from public life.

But very little about the question I actually wanted answered.

What happens next?

So rather than sitting at home trying to guess, I reached out to him and asked if he would sit down with me.

He agreed.

This is his first sit down interview for an international audience since everything happened, and my main aim was simply to understand where things stand now.

Is he staying in Ukraine? Is he still going to be involved in the transformation of Ukraine’s military? What is his relationship with Zelensky now?

And perhaps most importantly, what happens to the relationships he built with some of the most powerful technology figures in the world?

That includes Elon Musk.

Whatever anyone thinks about one private individual having this much influence, Starlink remains enormously important to Ukraine. Keeping terminals functioning, maintaining communication with SpaceX and dealing with issues around access and whitelisting are not abstract technology debates. They can have very real consequences on the battlefield.

One of the most important things Fedorov tells me in this interview is that his channel of communication with Musk is still open.

That matters, particularly after the recent uncertainty surrounding Musk’s relationship with Ukraine’s leadership.

But the other thing I came away understanding is that Fedorov does not appear to be going anywhere.

There had been plenty of speculation about whether he might leave government, take a private defence job, or begin a completely different chapter.

Instead, he explains what he wants to do next, where he believes Ukraine’s defence technology revolution needs to go, and why he still sees himself as part of that mission.

I approached this interview in much the same way I approached my conversation with Robert Brovdi.

When something this complicated happens, I would much rather go and ask the people involved than spend weeks commentating from a distance. I am just one journalist with a camera trying to understand an extraordinary country at an extraordinary moment.

This channel is completely independent. There is no billionaire behind it, no corporate owner and no sponsor telling me what stories to cover. It exists because people watch the films, share them and choose to support my work.

So if you find this interview worthwhile, sharing it or leaving a comment genuinely helps more than you might think.

And if you would like to directly support my reporting and join my live streams, you can find my Patreon below!

I am very proud to be able to bring you this conversation, and I am excited to bring many more.

Thank you, genuinely, for watching.

The village of Uskut, Crimea, 1945. Photographed after the deportation of its entire Crimean Tatar population. Every house still standing. Nobody left to live in them. Wikipedia. Public domain.

This photograph was taken in 1945. Look at it carefully. Every house is still standing. The streets are still there. The hills behind the village are the same hills they have always been. Nothing has been bombed. Nothing has burned.

The people are simply gone.

That is what the deportation of the Crimean Tatars looked like from the outside. A village with no village in it. Multiply that by every Tatar settlement on the peninsula, and you begin to understand what happened in Crimea between 18 and 20 May 1944.

In seventy two hours, an entire people vanished from their homeland.

THEY WERE STILL THERE

Part 2 ended with Russia humiliated. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 had stripped it of its Black Sea Fleet. Within fifteen years Russia had torn up that treaty. Within a century it had rebuilt the fleet, retaken the strategic dominance, and had absolute control of Crimea.

The Crimean Tatars were still there.

They had outlasted Catherine. They had outlasted the Crimean War. They had watched their population shrink from nine in ten Crimeans to a fraction of that, their place names erased, their Khan’s Palace turned into a tourist attraction. They had survived the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the brief years in the early 1920s when Crimea was designated an autonomous republic and there was a fragile, fleeting sense that things might be different under Soviet rule.

They had survived the collectivisation of the 1930s, which stripped Tatar farmers of their land and produced a famine that killed tens of thousands. They had survived Stalin’s purges, which removed most of their political and intellectual leadership.

They were still there.

Stalin decided that was the problem.

THE PRETEXT

The pretext, by now familiar, was collaboration.

When Nazi Germany occupied Crimea in 1941, some Crimean Tatars did collaborate with the German occupiers.

Hitler had explicitly ordered in July 1941 that Crimean Tatars were to be protected from expulsion, partly as a diplomatic signal to Turkey. German commanders offered the Tatar population things Stalin had spent a decade taking away: land reform, freedom of religious practice, improved food supply. After the Soviet collectivisation of the 1930s had killed tens of thousands of their people, some Tatars saw the Germans as the lesser of two brutal powers. Others fought with the Red Army until the last day of the war. Stalin chose not to distinguish between the two. So did some members of every occupied Soviet population, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Georgians. The vast majority of Nazi collaborators across the entire Soviet Union came from those core Slavic nationalities. None of them faced collective punishment.

What Stalin chose to do with the Crimean Tatars was different.

The Soviet accusation claimed 20,000 Tatar soldiers had deserted from the Red Army. The actual documented figure of deserters verified by the NKVD’s own records across all nationalities in Crimea for the entire war was 479. The 20,000 figure was not based on any investigation. Beria’s deputies Serov and Kobulov simply took the total number of Crimean Tatars conscripted into the Red Army and retroactively declared every single one of them a deserter. They provided no evidence because there was none.

The man whose racist reports formed the original basis for the treason charges was the Soviet partisan commander Mokrousov, who had banned Crimean Tatars from serving in his partisan units, ordered attacks on Tatar villages, and whose movement had collapsed from 3,000 members to 150 under his leadership. Official Soviet reports described him as too drunk to carry out basic military duties. The justification for deporting 200,000 people originated with an incompetent alcoholic whose reports were fabricated.

Over 80 percent of the deportees were women and children. The men were still fighting in the war, many of them in the Red Army fighting the same Germans they were being accused of collaborating with. When the war ended, 8,927 Crimean Tatar soldiers were demobilised from the Soviet military and sent directly to the special settlements rather than home. They had fought for the Soviet Union until the final day of the war. Their reward was exile.

On 11 May 1944, Stalin signed Order No. 5859. It described the Crimean Tatars as collectively guilty of treason. It ordered their total removal from Crimea. Every man, woman and child. The entire population of an indigenous people, to be loaded onto trains and transported to Central Asia.

Beria requested and received 32,000 NKVD troops for the task. He told Stalin it could be completed in three days.

He was right.

Left: Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD, who proposed the deportation to Stalin and oversaw its execution. Top right: Ivan Serov, Deputy Head of the NKVD, who co-authored the fabricated treason charges claiming 20,000 Tatar deserters. Bottom right: Bogdan Kobulov, Deputy Head of the NKVD, who reported Crimea "cleansed of Tatars" and ordered the Arabat Spit killings when he discovered the operation was incomplete. All three were decorated for their role in the deportation. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

ONE NIGHT IN MAY

Nobody told the soldiers what the operation was until they were already in position.

In the early hours of 18 May 1944, 32,000 NKVD troops moved into place around every Tatar village and town in Crimea simultaneously. Their officers revealed the purpose of the mission only once the men were surrounding the houses. The Tatars had no warning.

Dilaver Ennanov, who was a boy in Simferopol that night, later described what happened:

“On the evening of May 17, numerous trucks appeared in Simferopol. Many, many soldiers appeared in the city. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, there was a loud knock on the door. I woke up to see an officer angrily reading something from a paper to my mother. Two soldiers stood before her. They hurried us, saying we had 10 minutes to gather our belongings. We were led out into the yard, where our neighbours, also Crimean Tatars, sat with their belongings in the rain, surrounded by internal troops. Cars arrived, and we were taken to the railway station. Amid tears, moans, and screams, the train began to move. As we crossed the border of Crimea, everyone on the train sang a song. They sang and wept, looking back.”

Usniye Cholpan remembered the same morning from a different village:

“In the early morning, Soviet soldiers burst into our house: Get ready. You traitors are being evicted. Where? Why? Confused and frightened, not understanding what was happening, the young children cried. First, I grabbed the Quran, then the frying pan and the coffee pot.”

She grabbed the Quran first. Then something to cook with. The things you reach for when you know you are not coming back.

Many grabbed only the Quran. They thought they were going to be shot, the way Jews were being shot by Germans across occupied Europe. Some did not even have time for that.

The vehicles that drove families from their homes to the railway stations were American trucks. Studebakers and Fords, supplied to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease programme as part of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany. The same alliance fighting to liberate Europe was providing the transport for this.

Memorial plaque at Simferopol railway station, marking the site from which the Crimean Tatar people were forcibly deported on 18 May 1944, along with Germans in 1941 and Armenians, Bulgarians and Greeks in June 1944. Two carnations left by visitors. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The trains were cattle wagons. Sealed. No windows. No sanitation. In some wagons there was no room to lie down. The journey to Central Asia took between two weeks and a month. Food and water were provided intermittently, sometimes not at all. People died on the trains. The elderly died first, then children. Bodies were removed at stops, or left inside until the next one. Survivors described the smell. They described the sound. They described arriving and not knowing, for days, who among their family was still alive.

Left: Crimean Tatars being forced onto freight wagons at departure, Crimea, May 1944. The overwhelming majority of those loaded onto these trains were women and children. The men were still fighting in the Red Army. Right: Deportees arriving at their destination in Central Asia after a journey of up to 2,000 miles in sealed cattle wagons with little food, water or medical care. Many did not survive the journey. Public domain.

By the evening of 20 May 1944, Beria’s deputy reported to Moscow that the operation was complete. 173,287 people loaded onto 67 trains. 63 trains already on their way. The remaining four departing that day.

Then came his final line to Stalin:

“During the conduct of the resettlement operation, no incidents occurred.”

An entire people removed from their homeland in seventy two hours.

No incidents.

THE ARABAT BARGE

There was one problem the planners had not anticipated.

A small group of Crimean Tatars had been missed. Fishermen and salt miners living on the Arabat Spit, a narrow strip of land running along Crimea’s northeastern coast, separating the Sivash lagoon from the Azov Sea. Remote enough that the operation had passed them by. Most of the men were at the front. The people left in those villages were women, children and the elderly.

When Kobulov reported to Beria that Crimea had been cleansed of Tatars, they were at a ceremony awarding medals to the participants in the operation. Someone mentioned the forgotten villages. Kobulov’s response was immediate: if a single Tatar remained alive in two hours, heads would roll.

There was no time for trains. There was no plan.

A local official found a solution. The remaining Tatars were rounded up at a marina and locked in the hold of an old barge. The barge was towed out to the deepest part of the Azov Sea. The kingston valves, the valves in the hull designed to let water in, were opened. The upper hatches were sealed. The barge sank slowly to the bottom. Convoy boats patrolled the surface for hours afterward to make sure no one escaped.

It was not a military operation. It was not a state decree. It was an inconvenience, solved in an afternoon, at a moment when the people responsible were otherwise occupied celebrating.

That is what this state does when it meets an obstacle it did not plan for. It was true in 1944. Anyone watching what Russia does today when its plans meet unexpected resistance will recognise the instinct immediately.

Left: Beria's top secret memo to Stalin dated 10 May 1944, requesting permission to deport the entire Crimean Tatar population. Stamped "Special Folder. Top Secret." Addressed to "Comrade Stalin I.V."

Right: The completion report signed by Beria, dated 4 July 1944. It lists the final numbers: 133,135 Tatars deported, along with 12,422 Bulgarians, 15,040 Greeks, 9,621 Armenians and others removed from Crimea. The final line reads: "During the conduct of the resettlement operation, no incidents occurred." Copy from the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Public domain.

THE DEATH TOLL

Nobody knows exactly how many died.

The Soviet Union did not keep those records honestly. What is known comes from three sources: partial Soviet archives, Tatar community surveys, and survivor testimony.

The NKVD’s own internal report from October 1944 acknowledged that conditions in the places of exile were catastrophic. Huts unfinished. Bread rations of 150 grams per person per day. No shoes. No wages paid since July. Infectious diseases spreading through the camps.

One hundred and fifty grams of bread. That is the weight of a small apple. Per person. Per day. Recorded in the NKVD’s own documents.

When the deportees arrived in Uzbekistan, the locals had been primed by Soviet propaganda to receive them as traitors and enemies of the people. In some places they were met with stones. The imam in one village called them collaborators from the pulpit. Over 80 percent of the arriving deportees were women and children. That is who the stones were thrown at.

Official Soviet figures acknowledge that 44,887 special settlers from Crimea died in 1944 and 1945 alone, roughly 20 percent of those deported. That figure does not include those who died on the trains. Tatar community surveys from the 1960s, conducted by Crimean Tatar activists including Mustafa Dzhemilev, put the total death toll at 109,956, around 46 percent of all deportees, dead within the first eighteen months. Independent historians place the figure at somewhere between 18 and 30 percent.

Take the most conservative figure. Eighteen percent of 200,000 people is 36,000 dead. In under two years. Not on a battlefield. In camps, in huts, in a landscape nothing like the one they had come from, with 150 grams of bread and no shoes.

This happened while the world’s attention was on Normandy. The Allied landings in France began on 6 June 1944, eighteen days after the last Tatar was removed from Crimea. History was looking elsewhere.

Where 200,000 people were sent. The overwhelming majority, around 151,000, were transported to Uzbekistan. The remainder were scattered across Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Urals and other remote regions of the USSR. The number of trains dispatched tells its own story: 7 on 1 June, 24 by 2 June, 44 by 5 June, 54 by 7 June. Source: Ukrinform / Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.

THE ERASURE

Within weeks of the deportation, the Soviet state began erasing the evidence that the Crimean Tatars had ever been there.

Tatar place names were wiped from maps for the second time in Crimean history. Catherine had done it in 1783. Now it happened again, faster and more completely. Over 80 percent of Crimean place names with Tatar origins were changed between 1944 and 1948. Villages renamed. Streets renamed. The Tatar language removed from schools, from publications, from public life. Books pulled from library shelves.

In some places, Crimean Tatar gravestones were pulled up and used as building material for roads. The dead were not permitted to mark the ground either.

The word Sürgün, which in the Crimean Tatar language means both expulsion and exile, became the name the Tatars gave to what had happened to them. It was a word they were forbidden to use publicly for decades.

Crimean Tatar homes were redistributed to new settlers. Soviet authorities seized 80,350 houses, 34,000 plots of land, around 50,000 head of cattle, vineyards, orchards, equipment and vehicles. All of it handed to migrants from the Russian interior.

Soviet propaganda leaflet, 1951. "Comrades, resettle to the rich and fertile Crimean region." Seven years after the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet state was actively recruiting Russian settlers to take over the emptied peninsula, offering free transport, housing, loans and tax exemptions. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The Khan’s Palace at Bakhchysarai was kept, as it had been kept under the Tsars, as a museum. As a curiosity. Stripped of the living culture that had built and maintained it for centuries.

A monument without a people.

THE RETURN THAT WASN’T

Stalin died in 1953. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation in the late 1950s rehabilitated many of the deported peoples, allowing them to return to their homelands.

The Crimean Tatars were specifically excluded.

Khrushchev publicly named the peoples who had suffered deportation. The Crimean Tatars appeared in his speech as “and others.” Two words. After everything that had been done to them, they were “and others.”

The official reason for their exclusion from rehabilitation was that Crimea had already been resettled and there was no room. The real reason was that return would mean acknowledging what had been done, and restitution of land that now belonged to someone else.

And if any Tatar tried to return anyway, a Soviet decree of November 1948 had already made the consequences clear. Escape from a place of compulsory settlement was punishable by twenty years of hard labour.

They remained in exile. In Uzbekistan. In Siberia. In Kazakhstan. Keeping their language alive in communities that had no country. Passing down the memory of villages they had been taken from as children to children who had never seen Crimea. Meeting in each other’s homes, speaking Crimean Tatar, talking always about the same thing.

“We all talked about Crimea,” Mustafa Dzhemilev later recalled. “Deportation was one of the central topics. We remembered who was deported and how, who died on the road and who survived. Many people had only the Quran with them. They thought they would be shot, just as Jews were shot by Germans.”

The right to return came slowly and was never fully honoured. From 1989, during Perestroika, Tatars began coming back. When Ukraine became independent in 1991 they came in larger numbers. They came back to bureaucratic obstacles at every turn, to land disputes they almost always lost, to a Crimean government dominated by ethnic Russians who did not want them there. If a Tatar family managed to buy a house and settle, the house could be bulldozed and the family expelled from Crimea by force.

They came back anyway.

Two maps of Crimea tell the full story. Left: Crimea in 1939, before the deportation. The percentages show Tatar population by region. In the south and southwest, Tatars made up between 55 and 89 percent of the population. Right: Crimea in 2001, after the partial return. Those same regions now show Tatar populations in the low single figures. The deportation and the decades of exile did not just remove people. It unmade a presence that had existed for over five hundred years. Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Ukrainian State Archives.

THE THIRD TIME

When Russian forces took Crimea in February 2014, the Crimean Tatars were among the first to understand what it meant.

Their Mejlis, the representative assembly that functions as their parliament, was banned by Russian authorities in 2016 and designated an extremist organisation. Their leaders were arrested, expelled from Crimea, or disappeared. Their media outlets were shut down. Tatar language broadcasting was taken off air. Young Tatar men began disappearing, taken by Russian security services, some never found.

Under occupation, if three Crimean Tatars gathered together it was considered an unauthorised assembly. They found ways around it. Weddings. Birthday celebrations. Prayers at home. The same instinct for survival that had kept the culture alive in Uzbekistan for forty years.

The pattern is not new. It is not subtle. It is the same pattern applied to this people three times now, across two and a half centuries.

Take the land. Remove the people. Erase the evidence. Call anyone who objects an extremist.

President Zelenskyy and Mustafa Dzhemilev at the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Crimean Tatar deportation, 18 May 2024, Kyiv. The Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar flags side by side. Office of the President of Ukraine. Public domain.

Mustafa Dzhemilev spent fifteen years in Soviet prisons for refusing to renounce his people’s right to their homeland. He staged hunger strikes that lasted months. He survived. He came back to Crimea. He was elected head of the Mejlis. He served in the Ukrainian parliament. He spent his entire adult life fighting to be allowed to exist in the place he was born.

In 2014, Russian authorities banned him from entering Crimea.

He was seventy years old.

He was born in Crimea on 13 November 1943. His family was deported on 18 May 1944.

He was six months old.

A commemorative stone laid by President Zelenskyy on 18 May 2024, the eightieth anniversary of the deportation, marking the site of a future memorial to the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide. The Crimean Tatar tamga symbol and the map of Ukraine with Crimea shown as part of it. Kyiv, Ukraine. Office of the President of Ukraine. Public domain.

NEXT

Three times Russia has taken Crimea. Three times it has used the same tools. A pretext. A promise of protection. And then erasure.

Catherine renamed the streets. Stalin emptied them. Putin locked the doors.

What none of them has managed, across two hundred and forty years of trying, is to erase the memory of the people who were there first.

Part 4 is the story of how Russia took Crimea for the third time, and what it has done there since.

Sources: NKVD Order No. 5859, 11 May 1944; Beria report to Stalin, 4 July 1944, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; J. Otto Pohl, “The False Charges of Treason against the Crimean Tatars,” International Committee for Crimea, 2010; Aurélie Campana, “Sürgün: The Crimean Tatars’ Deportation and Exile,” Sciences Po, 2008; Mubeyyin Batu Altan, “The Arabat Tragedy,” International Committee for Crimea; Ukraïner, “Genocide of the Crimean Tatars,” 2026; Euromaidan Press, “Sürgünlik: Remembering Stalin’s Deportation of the Crimean Tatars,” 2020; Survivor testimony of Dilaver Ennanov and Usniye Cholpan, Ukrainian Institute of National Memory; Vladyslav Havrylov, “Deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944,” Ukraïner; Slavinska Iryna and Pavlov Danylo, “Stop Asking, Start Demanding: Portrait of Mustafa Dzhemilev,” The Ukrainians, 2023; Human Rights Watch, “Crimea: Tatar Community Under Pressure,” 2014; Ukrinform deportation infographic, 2016; Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Crimean Tatar deportation data.

The Charge of the Light Brigade, 25 October 1854. William Simpson, 1855. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Russia had Crimea. It had the Black Sea Fleet. It had Sevastopol. It wanted more. The rest of the world said no. What followed was one of the most catastrophic, most consequential, and most forgotten wars in modern history.

Part 1 ended with Russia in control of Crimea, its Tatar population driven out, its place names erased, and a brand new naval base at Sevastopol projecting Russian power into the Black Sea. That was 1783. For the next seventy years Russia pushed further, testing how much it could take before someone pushed back.

In 1853, someone finally did.

THE EXCUSE, AND WHAT IT WAS HIDING

Russia picked its fight the same way it always picks its fights. It found a pretext that sounded righteous and used it to cover an ambition that was not.

The pretext in 1853 was religion. Russia declared itself the protector of Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule. It was the same language Catherine had used in 1783: protection, rescue, reluctant intervention on behalf of people who had not asked for help. Tsar Nicholas I sent troops into Ottoman-controlled territory and moved his Black Sea Fleet to attack Ottoman ships.

What he actually wanted was straightforward. The Ottoman Empire was weakening. Nicholas called it “the sick man of Europe.” He wanted access to the Turkish Straits, the narrow channel connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Control that, and Russia could project naval power anywhere in the world.

Britain and France looked at that and said no.

Not for noble reasons. Britain had trade routes to protect. France had a new emperor who needed a war to prove himself. Russia had moved against the Ottomans in 1853. Britain and France declared war in March 1854. It was the first time the major European powers had gone to war with each other in nearly forty years. The battlefield they chose was Crimea.

Siege of Sebastopol, 1854 to 1855. F.S. Weller. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

A note on spelling: you will see it written as Sebastopol in older maps and histories, including the map above. That was the anglicised version used throughout the 19th century. Sevastopol is the modern spelling, and the one you will have seen in news coverage of 2014 and 2022. Same city. Same harbour. Same story.

SEVASTOPOL

The plan was simple. Take Sevastopol. Destroy the Black Sea Fleet inside it. Remove Russia’s ability to threaten the region from the south. The whole siege, in theory, could be over in weeks.

It took almost a year.

Allied forces landed on the Crimean coast in September 1854, about thirty miles north of Sevastopol. They won the first battle. They pushed south. They surrounded the city and began a siege that would last three hundred and forty nine days.

Sevastopol in 1854 was not a large city. Its population was smaller than a modern English market town. But it sat on one of the finest natural harbours in the world, heavily fortified, defended by soldiers who understood exactly what losing it would mean. They held on through winter conditions that killed as many men as the fighting did.

The trenches outside Sevastopol in the winter of 1854 to 1855 were among the worst places on earth. Soldiers on both sides froze. Supply lines collapsed. Men died of cholera, dysentery and frostbite in numbers that dwarfed the battlefield casualties. Of the roughly 21,000 British soldiers who died in the entire war, two thirds never saw combat.

Britain was not alone in its losses. France lost nearly 95,000 men. Russia lost an estimated 450,000. Across all sides, roughly half a million people died in a war fought over a peninsula most of them had never heard of. The majority on every side never died in battle. The Crimean War was not a war of great cavalry charges and heroic last stands. It was a war of catastrophic military incompetence, of officers who had bought their commissions rather than earned them, of a supply system so broken that soldiers starved while ships full of food sat in harbour with nobody to unload them. It was a war that exposed, in front of the world’s first war correspondents, just how badly the whole operation was being run.

Tactical map of the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, 25 October 1854. The dotted line shows the route of the charge directly into the valley, with Russian artillery positioned on the hills on both sides. The circle marks the spot where Captain Nolan, who delivered the order to charge, was killed in the first minutes. From "Our Fighting Services" by Evelyn Wood. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE CHARGE

On 25 October 1854, a miscommunication between British commanders sent the Light Brigade, around 670 cavalrymen, directly into a valley flanked on three sides by Russian artillery. They charged anyway. In twenty minutes, roughly 120 men were dead and another 200 wounded or captured. They had taken the wrong objective entirely and achieved nothing.

A French general watching from the hillside said simply: it is magnificent, but it is not war.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote a poem about it that made it sound heroic. The poem is the reason most people have heard of it. The reality was a catastrophic failure of command that sent men to die because two generals could not agree on what a written order meant.

THE WOMAN IN THE HOSPITAL

There is one name from the Crimean War that almost everyone knows. And almost no one connects it to this war specifically.

Florence Nightingale.

When reports from the front began appearing in British newspapers, the public was horrified. Not by the fighting. But the hospitals. The wounded were lying in their own filth. There were no bandages. There was no system. Men who survived the battlefield were dying of infections that should have been treatable.

Nightingale arrived at the British military hospital at Scutari, across the water from Istanbul, in November 1854, with a team of 38 nurses. She found four miles of beds, most of them full, almost none of them properly supplied. She organised, lobbied and fought the military bureaucracy until the mortality rate collapsed. When she arrived, roughly 40 in every 100 patients were dying. By the time she left, it was closer to 2.

Modern nursing, as a profession, as a discipline, as something governments and medical institutions took seriously, was born in a war most people cannot place on a map.

Left: Florence Nightingale, photographed circa 1860. Right: Florence Nightingale receiving the wounded at Scutari, painted by Jerry Barrett, 1856. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

THE FIRST WAR CORRESPONDENTS

This is the part of the story that connects most directly to why Caolan Reports exists.

The Crimean War was the first conflict in history to be covered by war correspondents in real time. Not officers writing memoirs after the fact. Not government dispatches carefully edited before publication. Journalists, in the field, sending reports home while the war was still happening.

The man who started it was William Howard Russell, an Irishman working for The Times of London. He had no military training and no official permission from the army to be there in any meaningful sense. He went anyway. What he sent back was not the war the British government wanted the public to see.

He described the trenches. He described the hospitals. He described soldiers dying of cold and disease because the supply system had broken down so completely that men were going without boots in a Crimean winter while warehouses full of supplies sat unorganised in the harbour. He named the failures. He named the people responsible.

The British establishment was furious. The commander of British forces blamed Russell’s reporting for giving information to the enemy and undermining the morale of his troops. There were serious attempts to have him removed from the front entirely.

The public read every word.

"The wretched beggar who wanders the streets of London leads the life of a prince compared with the British soldier." William Howard Russell, dispatches to The Times, December 1854.

"The commonest accessories of a hospital are wanting; there is not the least attention paid to decency or clean linen; the stench is appalling... these men die without the least effort being made to save them." William Howard Russell, dispatches to The Times, 1854.

Russell’s dispatches sold newspapers in numbers The Times had never seen. They were read in parliament. The outrage they produced brought down the British government in January 1855, the first time in history that a sitting government fell directly because of press reporting from a war zone. It is also the reason Florence Nightingale was sent to Scutari. Public pressure, generated by Russell’s reporting, forced the government’s hand.

He did not just report the war. He changed it.

Then there was Roger Fenton. Fenton was a photographer, sent to Crimea partly because the British government hoped positive images might counter the damage Russell was doing. Give the public something to look at, something orderly and composed, and perhaps they would stop reading those dispatches with quite so much horror.

Fenton took around 360 photographs. He worked with equipment that required him to prepare glass plates in a converted wagon and expose them within minutes in unpredictable temperatures. Every photograph was a physical ordeal.

But one image cut through everything else. A rutted dirt road running through a shallow valley, with cannonballs scattered across it and piled in the ditch alongside. No soldiers. No bodies. Just the road, the hills, and the evidence of what had passed through. He called it The Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is one of the most reproduced war photographs ever made, and it achieved the opposite of what the government had hoped. It made the war feel real in a way that words alone had not quite managed.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Crimea, 1855. Photograph by Roger Fenton. The road the Light Brigade charged down. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The argument the army made against Russell in 1854 is the same argument made against war journalists today. That reporting from the front gives comfort to the enemy. That graphic coverage undermines public support for necessary military action. That journalists who show the reality of war cause more harm than good.

What Russell’s reporting did was force accountability. What Fenton’s photographs did was make the cost of war visible to people who would never come close to it. That is not undermining a war effort. That is the public’s right to know what is being done in their name.

The world’s first war correspondent went to Crimea in 1854. One hundred and seventy years later, Caolan Reports is in Kyiv. The technology is different. The argument about whether the work matters has not changed at all.

Left: William Howard Russell, war correspondent for The Times of London. Right: Roger Fenton, the first war photographer. Both in Crimea, 1855. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

RUSSIA LOSES

Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after nearly a year of siege. Russian forces blew up their own naval base rather than surrender it intact and retreated. The war was over.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, stripped Russia of almost everything it had gone to war to protect. It was barred from keeping a naval fleet in the Black Sea. Sevastopol, the port Russia had spent a year defending, was to be demilitarised. The gains of a century of southern expansion were, on paper, reversed.

Russia signed. It had no choice.

Left: The Treaty of Paris, signed 30 March 1856, presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. Right: The Congress of Paris, painted by Edouard Dubufe, 1856. The men in that room drew the lines Russia would spend the next century and a half trying to erase. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

It did not forget.

The humiliation of the Crimean War sat at the centre of Russian strategic thinking for the next century and a half. It drove military reform, industrialisation, and a deep institutional obsession with the Black Sea and the warm water ports that gave access to it. Sevastopol was not just a city to Russia. It was a wound.

In 1871, fifteen years after the treaty, Russia tore up the clause banning its Black Sea fleet the moment it judged it could get away with it. By the Soviet period, Sevastopol had become a near-mythologised symbol of Russian sacrifice and resistance, celebrated in films, monuments and school curricula across the USSR.

And in February 2014, when Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms appeared on the streets of Crimea, the first thing they secured was not a government building.

It was the naval base at Sevastopol.

One hundred and fifty eight years after the Treaty of Paris stripped it away, Russia took back what it had never stopped believing was its own.

NEXT

Russia lost the Crimean War. It signed the treaty. It accepted the terms. And then, slowly and deliberately, it undid every single one of them.

By 1944, Stalin had absolute control of Crimea, an unassailable Black Sea Fleet, and a Crimean Tatar population that had survived, against all odds, a century and a half of Russian rule. They had kept their language. They had kept their faith. They had kept their memory.

Stalin decided that was still too much. What he did next took seventy two hours.

That is Part 3.

Sources: Crimean War, Wikipedia; Orlando Figes, “Crimea: The Last Crusade” (2010); National Army Museum, “The Crimean War”; BBC History, “The Crimean War”; Florence Nightingale Museum, “Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War”; Roger Fenton Crimean War photographs, Library of Congress; Treaty of Paris 1856, Yale Avalon Project; The Times Digital Archive, William Howard Russell dispatches 1854 to 1856.

Carte des environs de la Mer-Noire où se trouvent l’Ukrayne, la petite Tartarie... Robert de Vaugondy, 1769. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

This French map, published in 1769 on the eve of the Russo-Turkish War that would lead directly to the 1783 annexation, translates as “Map of the environs of the Black Sea where one finds Ukraine, Little Tartary...” Crimea is shown entirely in Tatar place names: Bakczisarai (Bakhchysarai), the Khan’s capital, sits at the centre of the peninsula. Kozlow carries both its Tatar name and its emerging Russian alias “Eupatorie” in brackets. There is no Sevastopol. No Simferopol. No Feodosia. Those names did not exist yet. They would be invented by Russian colonisers fourteen years later, stamped over a world that looked exactly like this.

Part 1: Catherine the Great and the Annexation of 1783

The peninsula had survived Mongols, Genoese merchants and Ottoman conquest. It did not survive enlightenment.

One autumn morning in 1782, Empress Catherine II of Russia sat in her study in the Winter Palace drinking coffee. In her hand was a letter from Prince Grigory Potemkin, her most trusted advisor, commander of her armies and the man who had been urging her for months to move on Crimea before someone else did. “There will come a time,” Potemkin warned her, “when everything that we might now receive for free, we shall obtain for a high price.”

He was not wrong. On 19 April 1783, Catherine signed the manifesto formally annexing the Crimean Khanate to the Russian Empire. A sovereign state that had existed for three hundred and forty years, that had outlasted the Golden Horde that birthed it, that had traded with Venice and Genoa and Constantinople and Kyiv, that had burned Moscow and held half of Europe in terror for generations, was dissolved by a signature over a cup of coffee.

Potemkin was appointed its first governor. He named the new capital Sevastopol.

This is how Russia took Crimea the first time. Not in a day, and not without preparation. What looked like a sudden annexation was the final step of a decade-long campaign of manipulation, installation of puppet leaders, suppression of revolts and deliberate economic sabotage. The playbook Russia ran in 2014 was not invented in 2014. It was perfected in 1783. And the man who wrote it presented it to his empress over morning correspondence in the Winter Palace as a matter of strategic common sense.

THE ENLIGHTENED EMPRESS AND HER ENLIGHTENED AMBITIONS

Catherine the Great is one of history’s more instructive hypocrites.

She corresponded with Voltaire. She collected Rembrandt. She read Montesquieu and fancied herself a philosopher queen, a monarch guided by reason and the welfare of her subjects. She founded schools and hospitals, reformed the legal code, and cultivated an image across Europe as the embodiment of Enlightenment values applied to statecraft.

She also extended the institution of serfdom, binding millions of Russian peasants more tightly to the land than they had been under any of her predecessors. She brutally suppressed the Pugachev Rebellion of 1773, in which a Cossack leader led one of the largest peasant uprisings in Russian history, ending it with mass executions and the public display of dismembered bodies as a deterrent. And she spent the better part of her reign systematically dismantling every independent political entity on Russia’s borders: the Zaporozhian Sich, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in three successive partitions, and finally the Crimean Khanate.

Catherine’s view of Crimea was not complicated. It was a warm water port, a strategic gateway to the Black Sea and through it to the Mediterranean, and a persistent irritant on Russia’s southern flank. The Crimean Tatars had been raiding Russian territory for centuries. The Khanate had burned Moscow. For generations, the Russian state had paid tribute to Crimean khans to ransom its own captives. Catherine intended to end that humiliation permanently.

But she dressed it, as all Russian imperial ambitions have been dressed, in the language of liberation.

Modern collage of Catherine II and Potemkin.

Wikimedia Commons/shakko

THE DECADE OF MANIPULATION

Catherine did not simply invade. She understood that naked conquest required justification, and she was patient enough to manufacture it.

The process began with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, in which Russian forces inflicted some of the heaviest defeats in Ottoman history. The resulting Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was the turning point. It formally recognised the Crimean Khanate as independent of the Ottoman Empire, but the independence it granted was entirely nominal. Russia retained military garrisons at Kerch and Yenikale, key ports on the peninsula. The Khanate could no longer be considered truly sovereign with Russian troops stationed within its borders, a fact that Ottoman envoys protested and Russian diplomats ignored.

The treaty also granted Russia something else: the right to act as protector of Orthodox Christians living within the Ottoman Empire. This was not humanitarian sentiment. It was a legal instrument, a lever Catherine could pull whenever she needed a pretext for intervention. Russia would use this exact mechanism, the claim to protect a religious or ethnic minority, as a justification for territorial aggression again in 1853, in 1878, in 2008, and in 2014. The pattern is so consistent it deserves its own name.

Having secured nominal Crimean independence, Catherine immediately began undermining it. Russian agents worked to destabilise the Khanate’s internal politics, provoking rivalries between claimants to the throne. When unrest followed, Russian troops intervened to restore order, which they defined as installing whichever Khan was most amenable to Russian direction. By 1777 Catherine had her preferred candidate on the throne: Şahin Giray, a Westernised reformer who had spent time at the Russian court and believed he could modernise the Khanate on Enlightenment principles.

He could not. Şahin Giray’s reforms, including a centralised bureaucracy, a standing army and taxation of the Tatar nobility, were deeply unpopular. His subjects saw him, correctly, as a Russian instrument. Uprisings followed. Russian troops suppressed them. The cycle repeated until the Khanate’s political will was exhausted and its economic foundations were deliberately hollowed out.

Before the formal annexation, Russia had already removed the Khanate’s most productive taxpayers. Between 1778 and 1779, under the direct orders of General Alexander Suvorov and with Catherine’s personal approval, over 30,000 Armenian and Greek Christians were forcibly relocated from Crimea to the Russian interior. Russian propaganda described this as the rescue of Christians from Muslim rule. The Christians of Crimea had lived peacefully alongside the Tatars for centuries. The relocation was not rescue. It was economic sabotage. The Christian merchant class was the backbone of the Khanate’s urban economy. Remove them and the tax base collapses. Collapse the tax base and the state cannot function. A state that cannot function cannot resist.

By 1782 Şahin Giray had renounced his throne. There was nothing left to govern. In the autumn of that year, Potemkin wrote his famous letter to Catherine outlining the case for annexation. “The position of Crimea interferes into our borders,” he wrote. “Believe me, with this acquisition you will achieve immortal glory such as no other Sovereign in Russia has ever had.”

On 19 April 1783, she signed the manifesto. Officially, over 30,000 Crimean Tatars were killed in the immediate aftermath of the annexation as Russian punitive squads dealt with those who resisted. The actual death toll was higher.

Left: Şahin Giray, the last Khan of Crimea. Right: Catherine the Great's annexation manifesto, dated 20 July 1783. Both images public domain.

THE RENAMING OF THE WORLD

Once the manifesto was signed, the work of erasure began.

Potemkin, as governor of the new Taurida Oblast, moved immediately to expropriate Tatar land and redistribute it to Russian nobles. Catherine herself gave away vast estates on the peninsula to her favourites at court. The Tatar nobility, the social and administrative structure that had governed the Khanate for three centuries, was dismantled and replaced with Russian imperial bureaucracy.

Then came the renaming.

The Crimean Tatars had named this land across generations. Their place names carried history, geography, memory. Aqmescit, the White Mosque, became Simferopol. Aqyar, the White Cliff, became Sevastopol. Kezlev became Yevpatoria. Kefe, the ancient Genoese slave port that had been the commercial heart of the Khanate, became Feodosia, a Greek name applied by Russian colonisers to a city the Greeks had not controlled for a thousand years. Everywhere the Tatar names were stripped away and replaced with Greek-sounding Russian inventions, designed to suggest an ancient classical heritage for a colonial project that was barely a decade old.

This was deliberate, and it was understood as such at the time. Catherine had tasked imperial scholars explicitly with justifying the 1783 occupation and proving that the Crimean Tatars had no legitimate historical claim to their own homeland. History, in the Russian imperial tradition, was always something to be written rather than recorded.

The magnificent Khan’s Palace at Bakhchysarai, the administrative and cultural heart of the Crimean Khanate for three centuries, was not destroyed. It was kept, partially, as a curiosity. Russian aristocrats visited it on tours of the new acquisition. Alexander Pushkin wrote a famous poem about its fountain. The palace was preserved the way a trophy is preserved: as evidence of what had been conquered, stripped of the living culture that had built it.

The Grand Mosque of the Khan's Palace, Bakhchysarai. The palace was the seat of Crimean Tatar power for over three centuries. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. A.Savin - Own work

THE NUMBERS THAT TELL THE STORY

Before 1783, Crimean Tatars made up between 90 and 98 percent of the peninsula’s population. They were not a minority. They were the people of Crimea. They had been there, continuously, for centuries.

By 1800, between 100,000 and 300,000 Tatars had left the peninsula for the Ottoman Empire, a first wave of an exodus that would continue in surges for the next two centuries. In just ten years after the annexation, historians estimate that approximately 330,000 Crimean Tatars had been driven into exile.

The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 triggered another mass exodus. Between 1855 and 1866, at least 500,000 Muslims, possibly up to 900,000, left the Russian Empire for the Ottoman world. A significant proportion came from Crimea.

By 1897, a century after the annexation, Crimean Tatars had gone from being 98 percent of the population to 34 percent. By the time of the Soviet census of 1939, they were 19 percent. And then in May 1944, Stalin finished what Catherine had started.

That number, from 98 percent to 13 percent today, is not the result of natural demographic change. It is the result of deliberate, sustained, multigenerational ethnic displacement pursued as state policy across two centuries by two successive imperial systems.

Russia calls this history. The Crimean Tatars call it what it is.

THE TEMPLATE

In February 2014, Russian troops without insignia appeared on the streets of Crimea. They occupied government buildings, seized the airport, surrounded Ukrainian military bases. The Kremlin denied they were Russian soldiers. Putin later admitted they were.

Russian troops without insignia at Perevalne military base, Crimea, March 2014. The soldiers Russia initially denied were its own. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Anton Holoborodko

A referendum was organised in two weeks. International observers were not permitted. The result, 96.77 percent in favour of joining Russia, was accepted by no recognised international body. The annexation was declared complete on 18 March 2014.

The parallels with 1783 are not coincidental. They are structural. Install a compliant local leadership. Destabilise the existing government. Manufacture a pretext based on the protection of a threatened population. Move troops in under ambiguous circumstances. Annex. Rename. Resettle.

Potemkin wrote the manual. Putin read it.

The one difference between 1783 and 2014 is that in 1783, the great powers of Europe eventually accepted what Russia had done. France filed a note of protest and then dropped it when Russia reminded them that France had annexed Corsica without objection. Britain and Austria looked away. The Treaty of Constantinople in 1784 formalised the loss.

In 2014, the world said it would not accept the annexation. A decade later, Russia occupies Crimea still, the Crimean Tatars face renewed persecution, and the international community’s response remains the subject of ongoing debate.

The theft of 1783 was never reversed. It took a hundred and sixty eight years, a world war, and twenty million Soviet deaths before even the question of Crimea’s status was reconsidered. And then in 1954, Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an administrative gesture inside a single state that became one of the most consequential decisions in post-Soviet history.

NEXT

Russia had its fleet. It had its renamed cities. It had reduced the Tatar population from nine in ten Crimeans to a shrinking minority. But it had not finished with Crimea, and the rest of the world had not finished with Russia.

Seventy years after Catherine signed her manifesto, Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire went to war specifically to stop Russia doing to the wider region what it had already done to Crimea. The battle that followed was fought on the same peninsula, around the same naval base, and it would produce some of the most famous military disasters in British history.

That is Part 2.

40 days after President Zelensky launched a campaign to pressure Russia towards peace, there is still no ceasefire. At the same time, Ukraine's strikes are putting growing pressure on Russia's military industry, logistics, and economy. Some analysts now say the country is weaker than at any point since 1991.

Holy Presentation Church, Beryslav, before its destruction. Photo: Oleh Marchuk / MOST

No metal ever held this building together. Not one nail. The Cossacks who built it in 1725 joined oak beam to oak beam with wooden pegs alone, the way you would build a boat, not a church. That turned out to be fitting. Before this church ever stood still, it sailed.

It began as a military chapel inside the Perevolochna fortress, on the edge of the Zaporozhian Sich, in what is now Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It was built for Cossacks, by Cossacks, out of oak. It was called the Resurrection Church.

Consider where that fortress sat. This was the border. Beyond it lay the Crimean Khanate, and the Khanate had already built its own fortress downriver, Kyzykermen, specifically to block Cossack boats from reaching the Black Sea. Two fortresses, two peoples, one river between them. This church was raised inside that standoff.

In 1784, the standoff was long over, and the Cossacks who had once manned Perevolochna were resettled south, to the very ground the Khanate’s fortress had occupied. They did not leave their church behind. They took it apart, plank by plank, peg by peg, and floated it more than three hundred kilometres down the Dnipro on rafts. They rebuilt it at Kyzykermen, on the site that would become the town of Beryslav. A church that started life as a border outpost’s chapel ended up standing on the ruins of the fortress that had once tried to keep Cossacks out of that same river.

It survived that move. It survived far more after.

In 1853, during the Crimean War, the town moved the church again, out to the Vvedenske cemetery on Beryslav’s edge, and rededicated it to the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple. Locals simply called it the Vvedenska church, or, more often, the wooden church. Inside it, the parish kept a Gospel printed in 1695, a book thirty years older than the building itself.

Then came the Bolsheviks. They closed the church in 1939 and turned it into a storage depot. There was a serious plan to tear it apart for firewood. A three-hundred-year-old hand-pegged oak structure, built by Cossacks, nearly ended its life heating someone’s stove. It did not. Nobody now can say exactly why the plan was dropped. The church survived Soviet power by margin, not by protection.

Then came the Germans. Under occupation, services resumed inside the church, and in 1942 German soldiers built a military cemetery around it. A Ukrainian Cossack chapel, standing through a Nazi occupation, hosting Orthodox services while foreign soldiers were buried at its walls. History rarely offers a detail that strange. This one is documented. The priest who reopened it, Father Danyil, went on serving there into the 1960s.

It survived that too.

For decades afterward, it simply stood. Through the rest of the Soviet period, through independence, through the slow accumulation of an ordinary parish’s ordinary life. In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion reached Kherson Oblast, and Beryslav fell under occupation. When Ukrainian forces liberated the west bank later that year, Beryslav stayed on the front line, one of the most heavily and continuously shelled towns in the country. Every other landmark around it took damage. The wooden church did not. For three years, it was the one thing in Beryslav the war had not managed to touch.

The war reached the church in other ways first. At the time of its destruction, the parish’s rector was a man named Oleksandr Mykhailenko, who had collaborated with the Russian occupation authorities and fled with their retreating troops. A new rector, Father Mykola Ponych, had since taken his place. Even a building this old was not immune to the smaller betrayals of the war going on around it.

In 2023, the town’s military administration asked Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture to formally transfer the church into state ownership. It was still administered, on paper, by the Moscow Patriarchate’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church, in the Novokakhovka Eparchy headed by a Russian citizen, Metropolitan Filaret. The request went nowhere. Nobody resolved it. The building that had outlasted the Bolsheviks and the Wehrmacht sat for three more years technically under the ecclesiastical authority of the country now trying to destroy it.

In May 2026, a photograph of the church, taken by Oleh Marchuk, won a special nomination in Ukraine’s Wiki Loves Monuments contest, entered alongside more than five thousand photographs of the country’s wooden architecture. People were still finding it beautiful. People were still pointing cameras at it. Three months later, on the night of 1 to 2 August 2026, a Russian drone struck it, and it burned.

Photo released by the Beryslav City Military Administration, via MOST

Oleksandr Alchiyev, head of the Beryslav City Military Administration, released the photographs himself and put the loss plainly.

Its destruction is a loss that cannot be measured only by the value of the timber or the building. Together with the temple we have lost part of the material memory of the people who lived on this land long before the emergence of modern borders.

Nobody yet knows what happened to the icons inside, or the old wooden altar cross the Cossacks are said to have given the church, or the seventeenth-century Gospel kept in it. As of writing, there is no word on whether anything was saved.

No nail ever held that church together. Fire did not need one either.

This is the second building of its kind we have covered this year. In June, Russia struck the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the spiritual heart of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, founded in 1051. In August, it struck a wooden Cossack chapel built on the empire’s old southern border. One was the faith’s grandest monument. The other was its plainest. Between them sits nearly a thousand years of Ukrainian religious life, and Russia has now put a missile or a drone through both ends of it in the same summer.

While I was in the Carpathian Mountains editing my latest frontline documentary from eastern Ukraine, news broke that a Russian Kh-101 cruise missile had crashed in Poland.

I packed up my camera, drove across the border, and headed to the impact site. The crater had already been filled in by the time I arrived, but I was able to film the location, speak to local people, and look at the bigger picture of what this incident might mean.

A lot of the discussion has focused on whether the missile was intentional or accidental. I wanted to ask a different question: what lesson does the Kremlin take away from NATO’s response, and what does this tell us about deterrence as Russia continues to test the Alliance’s boundaries?

From drone incursions over Romania to airspace violations near Estonia and beyond, these incidents are becoming more frequent. This report looks at where that trend could be heading, and why it matters far beyond Ukraine.

As always, thank you so much for watching and for supporting independent journalism. If you found the report interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you left a comment and subscribed. It genuinely helps more people discover my work, and it allows me to keep making these documentaries.

Take care, and thank you for being here.

Ukraine is fighting another war against Russia right now. Not just against its military, but against its psychology.

The long-range strikes inside Russia are increasing. Night after night, those red arrows appear across the map. Oil refineries burn. Fuel becomes harder to find. Warehouses and logistics networks are disrupted. A war that many Russians once experienced through a television screen is becoming harder to ignore in everyday life.

But there is a much bigger picture.

I’ve just returned from the front lines around Kramatorsk, and the reality there is difficult. Russia continues to grind forward, slowly but persistently, while Ukraine faces serious pressure from manpower shortages. A few metres may sound insignificant. Over weeks and months, those metres add up.

That is why I believe we are watching a race against time.

Can Ukraine use long-range strikes to damage Russia’s war economy, logistics and sense of security quickly enough to change the balance before Russia’s numerical advantage produces further gains on the battlefield?

The truth from the front isn’t always comfortable. But telling you what I actually see, rather than what I think people want to hear, is why I made this channel.

I hope you find this report interesting. If you do, please leave a comment telling me what stood out to you and what you’d like me to investigate next. It genuinely helps the channel, and I read your feedback.

Thank you for watching.

Caolan 🇺🇦🇮🇪

Since Ukraine began its operation to isolate occupied Crimea, I have been desperate to understand what is really happening on the peninsula.

Independent journalists cannot report anywhere near Crimea. The information coming out is fragmented, heavily controlled and buried beneath propaganda.

So I went to the closest possible source: the man directing the operation.

His name is Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar. He's the Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces and one of the central figures behind the campaign targeting Russia’s fuel, logistics, air defences and military infrastructure in occupied Crimea.

This is an unprecedented, in-depth interview about far more than one operation.

Brovdi explains what Ukraine is trying to achieve in Crimea, why he believes the occupation can be made unsustainable without a ground assault, and how Ukraine’s increasingly deep strikes inside Russia could shape the outcome of this war far beyond the front line.

He also tells the extraordinary personal story behind it all: how a grain trader became a soldier, how a group of just 27 people began experimenting with civilian drones, and how that improvised effort grew into an entirely new branch of the Ukrainian military.

In this interview, we discuss:

• The operation to isolate occupied Crimea

• Strikes against Russian fuel, shipping and logistics

• How Ukraine penetrated Russia’s air-defence network

• The rise of long-range Ukrainian drone warfare

• Why Brovdi believes NATO is running out of time

• How civilian drones transformed the battlefield

• His journey from businessman to military commander

• The family life, art and future he has placed on hold

• What he believes comes next for Ukraine and Russia

I am so incredibly proud to bring you this interview as an independent journalist.

This film was produced without government funding or political sponsorship. Work like this is possible because people watch, share and directly support my reports.

Thank you sincerely for giving me your time and for continuing to watch my reporting from Ukraine.

Alumina is a fine white powder. Once smelted, it becomes aluminium, a metal essential to modern industry and also to military production, including aircraft, armoured vehicles, missiles and other weapons systems.

I began investigating this supply chain after reading a report in The Irish Times earlier this year. I contacted the refinery with questions, but my calls and emails went unanswered.

So I booked a flight home to Ireland and decided to investigate it myself.

What I expected to be a short report about a single supply route became one of the largest and most difficult investigations I have ever undertaken.

It led me through the ownership of the refinery, its connections to Russia, the environmental damage experienced by people living nearby, the silence surrounding the operation and the political system that allowed it to continue largely unchallenged.

I met local people who had been asking questions for years. Farmers who said their lives had been devastated. Workers who were frightened to speak publicly. Independent reporters who had tried to raise the alarm long before the rest of the country began paying attention.

As I started publishing reports from the ground, the story spread further than I could ever have expected.

The videos received more than 11 million views across my platforms. Within days, the investigation moved from social media into local, national and international coverage. Ministers were questioned. European officials became involved. A refinery that very few people had heard of suddenly became the centre of a major argument about Ireland, Russia, sanctions and the war in Ukraine.

After weeks of filming, research and painstaking editing, this is the full story.

It includes the investigation itself, the people we met, the political confrontations, the moments that happened behind the scenes and the extraordinary chain of events that followed once the public began paying attention.

This film was made entirely independently.

Many major Irish media organisations receive substantial public funding. I have chosen to keep this channel independent of governments, corporations, sponsors, billionaires and private interests.

There are no sponsorship deals behind this film and no wealthy backers deciding what I can or cannot investigate. The work is funded almost entirely by the people who watch it.

In the last few days, Putin gave one of the weirdest interviews I’ve seen in a long time.

He sat there staring past the man in front of him, clearly reading from a screen, rattling through tiny villages, rivers and battlefield positions that almost nobody in Russia could point to on a map.

And the whole thing felt strange.

It didn’t sound like a leader confidently explaining a war. It sounded like a man either being fed completely wrong information, or just saying whatever he needed to say to keep the fantasy alive.

That matters, because Ukraine’s recent long-range strikes into Crimea may have shaken something much deeper. Crimea is not just another piece of occupied territory for Putin. It is his trophy. His symbol. His great imperial prize in the Black Sea.

So what happens when that starts to look vulnerable?

To understand this properly, I spoke to Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who has spent decades studying authoritarianism, Soviet history, propaganda and the mindset of regimes like Putin’s.

We talked about what is happening inside Russia, why Putin seems so trapped inside his own war, and what these strange public performances might tell us about the state of the Kremlin.