Digital vigilantes hunt Ukrainian patriots in Crimea — and at the Euros

A building in Simferopol shows a “heroic” Russian soldier with the Z symbol as Crimeans are reminded of which side they should be on

AFP

Today, the peninsula is a simmering hotbed of fear and suspicion, and a terrifying example of what Ukrainians can expect if Russians seize other parts of their country.

Ukraine has notched some notable military successes against Crimea, including several devastating attacks on Russian targets that have wiped out air defences, led to the retreat of the Black Sea fleet and prompted Kremlin threats to retaliate against the country’s western allies.

In response, the increasingly nervous occupiers have resorted to ever more brutal measures to sniff out Ukrainian patriots and obliterate their cultural identity.

One example is “Crimean Smersh”, a Telegram account set up last year by Alexander Talipov, a blogger. Its name is a nod to the original Smersh, a 1940s counterintelligence group under Josef Stalin, whose name, coined by Stalin himself, derives from the Russian for “Death to Spies”.

In an internet-era twist that would warm the heart of the old Soviet dictator, it offers people the opportunity to denounce their friends and neighbours online — “Our school headmaster has been hiding the Ukrainian flag in the basement,” was one recent example — and publishes videos of police violently raiding homes, humiliating victims and forcing them to confess and apologise before being sent off to prison.

Talipov calls it a “register of Russophobes, Ukronazis and traitors”, adding in a television interview: “The few black sheep who spoil the picture in our patriotic region must be identified and punished in a timely manner.” It appears to operate with the approval of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB.

Among the unfortunates snared last week in this sinister web was Anatoly Goliakovych, 63, a plastic surgeon from the city of Alushta on the southern Crimean coast.

He made the mistake of telling the cashier at his local supermarket that he wanted to pay “in the Ukrainian way”, meaning with hryvnias, the old currency before roubles appeared. She replied: “We’re in Russia now”, to which he countered: “You’ve sold out. I’m a patriot!”

The exchange was captured on CCTV and relayed to the Crimean Smersh goons, who went into action. Goliakovych is seen in a video looking dazed, his lip split open and wearing a grimy white shirt open at the chest, as a man in a black hood asks him in a menacing tone: “Who does Crimea belong to?”

The destruction of the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea with Russia was a major coup for Ukraine and an embarrassment for Russia. Two years later Crimeans were pictured at a ceremony to mark the tenth anniversary of the annexation with a mural of the bridge

ALEXEY PAVLISHAK/REUTERS

ALEXEY PAVLISHAK/REUTERS

With a defiant look in his eyes, Goliakovych raises his head and instead of meekly giving the required answer, “Russia”, bravely replies: “It’s mine.”

A subsequent video posted some time later shows him singing a different tune. Cowed, clearly frightened, he apologises for his crime. “I totally accept my guilt. I wasn’t right, I will never say anything like this again.”

The Crimean Smersh operatives then congratulate themselves on wrapping up another case: “He [Goliakovych] will think about his actions while spending 15 days in jail,” they say on their Telegram site. “He will pay a fine of 30,000 roubles” — about £250.

The football-loving brothers, from Yevpatoria, another Crimean seaside resort, did not respond to messages and it is not known if they are aware of being targeted over their Ukrainian flag picture, which prompted furious comments on the Crimean Smersh app from a digital lynch mob eager to punish the “traitors”. “Your wives and kids have a business in Crimea, hotels at the seaside, wasn’t that enough for you bastards?” wrote one.

Crimean Smersh has also named, shamed and incriminated people for posting “offensive” pictures of Putin online, “liking” Ukrainian singers and poets on social media, painting walls — or their fingernails — in Ukraine’s colours of yellow or blue, or pinning yellow ribbons on trees, the latter a form of dissent common across all Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. It often accuses citizens of “discrediting the Russian army”, a catch-all criminal charge that can cover most pro-Ukrainian social media content and results in a 15-day prison sentence and fine.

But punishing Ukrainian patriotism is only the ugly tip of an iceberg of abuse being perpetrated by Russia on the territory it acquired in 1783 — when it was annexed by Catherine the Great — and then lost in 1991, when Ukraine, like all the other former land belonging to states of the defunct Soviet Union, including Russia, won independence.

Preparations are made for a concert in Red Square, Moscow, in March this year to mark the tenth anniversary of the annexation

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP

Putin, who calls Crimea a “holy land” and “sacred place”, was widely applauded at home — and by Crimea’s 1.5 million ethnic Russians, who make up more than 60 of the peninsula’s population — for his stealthily executed land grab in March 2014, days after the pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was forced by protesters to flee Kyiv in the Maidan revolution.

Yet even many ethnic Russians who cheered on the “little green men” in combat fatigues as they carried out the annexation of Crimea are now showing signs of buyer’s remorse: prices have risen, living standards have fallen and the freedoms people enjoyed there before 2014, as part of a country aspiring to join the EU, have been replaced by the suffocating restrictions of life in Putin’s totalitarian police state.

Ruling on a longstanding complaint from Ukraine, on Tuesday the European Court of Human Rights painted a grim picture of life in Crimea, accusing Russia of large-scale and systematic violations of human rights, forced disappearances, torture, including electrocution and mock executions, as well as the transfer of 12,500 Ukrainian prisoners to distant, ice-bound penal colonies where it was hard for their families to reach them.

Pro-Ukrainian media outlets have been abolished and the Ukrainian language suppressed in schools. Ukrainian banks have been nationalised, along with their customers’ property and assets.

Crimean Tatars, a long-persecuted Muslim minority — to which the football-fan brothers belong — have borne the brunt of the oppression: between 15,000 and 30,000 fled the region in the years after 2014, and many more in the wake of what Ukrainians refer to as the “full-scale” invasion eight years later.

Tatar television channels have been taken off air and their cultural and religious buildings vandalised. Some Tatar homes have been painted with crosses and gatherings of Tatar leaders violently broken up, their participants arrested. Next to their Ukrainian flag, the Yakubov bothers also held up a Tatar flag.

“Young men are being beaten and humiliated, some have been sentenced to 15 years prison on alleged extremism charges,” Murat Suleimanov, an exiled Tatar mufti told me in Kyiv. “Those who can get out are leaving for Turkey or the US. A lot left after Putin’s mobilisation order last year, fearing they were about to be drafted to fight fellow countrymen in Ukraine.”

Russia, meanwhile, has stepped up its “Russification” campaign in Crimea.

“The Russians are encouraging people to go there, they offer financial incentives, higher salaries, saying, ‘You live in Siberia but you could live in Crimea with lots of sun and sea in a nice tropical climate’,” said Tamila Tasheva, an activist and politician who since 2022 has been President Zelensky’s permanent representative for Crimea.

“[The Russians] have sent in teachers, judges and lawyers, they understand that they need Russian people, that’ll be a big problem for us in the future,” she added.

Tamila Tasheva, President Zelensky’s representative for Crimea, said Russians were being enticed to move to Crimea but resistance against the occupation was growing on the peninsula

Tasheva is a Crimean Tatar whose family were forcibly exiled by Stalin from the land they had lived in for centuries and deported to Uzbekistan, along with thousands of others, in 1944.

The family returned home when Tasheva was five. “We have a dream as Tatar people to live in our motherland of Crimea, at peace with the Ukrainian state, which recognises us as a Ukrainian indigenous people,” she said.

Now, she believes, the tide is turning at last against Russia’s rule in Crimea: she had heard from “our intelligence” that Russian military commanders had been sending their wives and children home, fearing for their safety.

Devastating attacks on the peninsula since 2022 have exposed Russian vulnerability for the first time since 2014 and suggest Ukraine envisages Crimea, a staging post for the full-scale invasion, as the soft underbelly of what Putin calls his “special military operation”.

A video last Sunday showed panicked beachgoers fleeing from falling shrapnel after Russian air defence intercepted US-supplied ATACMS missiles fired by Ukraine in its latest assault on the strategic port of Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city.

About 150 people were injured and four killed, including two children. The Kremlin called it “barbaric” and warned of unspecified consequences.

This was only the latest in a string of missile and drone attacks on ports, ammunition dumps, military bases and airfields throughout the peninsula that have greatly reduced its appeal to tourists. In July last year, a vast bridge linking Crimea with Russia, opened by Putin himself in 2018, was attacked by two exploding drone boats, destroying part of the road in a humiliating setback for the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, various shadowy resistance groups have sprung up in Crimea to claim credit for a hand in the mayhem. One is the Crimean Combat Seagulls, who have assisted Ukraine with intelligence-gathering and target selection, as well as carrying out sabotage on railways, Russian military vehicles and soldiers’ cars.

“More and more of our people are starting to resist,” said Tasheva. “With the help of our western allies, we will win.”