Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy awarded the Golden Star Order and the title of the Hero of Ukraine to longtime Crimean Tatar leader and human rights activist Mustafa Dzhemilev, who spent much of his life fighting Soviet and later Russian repression.
The ceremony, which took place in Kyiv on November 13, coincided with Dzhemilev's 80th birthday.
Dzhemilev headed the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar's self-governing body, from its founding in 1991 -- when Ukraine achieved independence from the Soviet Union -- until 2013. He sided with Kyiv when Russia seized Crimea in 2014 and was later barred from entering his homeland by the Kremlin.
It was the second time Moscow had banned Dzhemilev from Crimea. As an infant, he was deported to Central Asia along with the rest of the Crimean Tatars by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin during World War II.
Dzhemilev told RFE/RL on November 13 that as a teenager he began taking part in the activities of the underground Crimean Tatar resistance movement in the Soviet Uzbekistan, where he and his family were deported.
Dzhemilev was a leading human rights activist during the Soviet era and served six jail sentences in Soviet prison camps from 1966 to 1986. He is also known for going on a 303-day hunger strike -- the longest in the history of the Soviet human rights movement.
He returned to his homeland in the late 1980s along with thousands of other Tatars as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in a period of reforms and freedoms known as "Perestroika" and "Glasnost."
He later became a member of Ukraine's parliament representing Crimea.
He has continued to fight for the rights of his ethnic brethren in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Since seizing Crimea nearly a decade ago, Russia has oppressed members of the Turkic-speaking minority on the peninsula who opposed Moscow's rule, including jailing dozens of Crimean Tatars.