An excerpt from Tom Parfitt's piece in "The Telegraph" on the plight of Crimean Tatars:
This spring, two tragedies hit Ilmi Umerov in one week. First his father died suddenly after a short illness. Then his homeland of Crimea was wrenched from Ukraine and absorbed by Russia.
Mr Umerov is one of 240,000 indigenous Crimean Tatars who live on the Crimean peninsula, which dangles from Ukraine into the Black Sea but which was annexed by the Kremlin in March. His father, Rustem, survived Joseph Stalin’s brutal deportation of the Tartars to Central Asia in 1944 and a ten-year stint in the gulag to return home from exile to his native Crimea as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Now, six months on from the annexation, the Muslim Tatars are facing a new wave of cruelty as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, brings his own brand of authoritarian rule to this newly-minted Russian republic.
Read his full report here:
Today is Russian President Vladimir Putin's 62nd birthday. He is spending the day in the Siberian taiga, according to his spokesman -- "some 300 to 400 kilometers from the closest inhabited place." He may not have the Internet there, so it's unclear whether he'll be able to see this vaguely unsettling, hagiographic birthday video that was prepared for him by some young performers in St. Petersburg:
An election campaign poster promoting Batkivshchyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko ahead of Urkaine's October 26 parliamentary elections:
