“What do I miss about Crimea?” Vanda Boiko wonders aloud, between sips of coffee on Lviv’s main square.
“My mother, my grandmother and some friends, and the smell of the flowering trees in springtime,” she says.
Then she takes another sip, shrugs her shoulders and adds: “That’s it. Nothing else.”
The 21-year-old is one of more than 2,000 Crimeans who left for Lviv when Russia annexed the peninsula last month, swapping home by the Black Sea in Ukraine’s most Moscow-friendly region for a new life close to Poland in a fiercely pro-EU, pro-revolutionary city.
“I was a volunteer on Maidan,” says Boiko, recalling days and nights spent ferrying food and drinks around Kiev’s Independence Square, the epicentre of anti-government protests.
“And I was there in the worst times, when so many people were killed. I went home a week later, hoping to find things had changed in Crimea. They hadn’t. It was like a different planet to Kiev.”
As Ukraine's new government and the West condemned fugitive ex-president Viktor Yanukovich and his security services over the deaths of more than 100 protesters, Boiko returned to Crimea to find members of the feared Berkut riot police being welcomed back as heroes.
“Yevpatoria is not a big town and people knew I had been on Maidan,” she says.
“My mother has a little business there and couldn’t leave, and it would be hard for my grandmother to move. But we decided it would be better for me to go. So I got on a train, and 25 hours later I arrived in Lviv.”
Illegitimate rule
Boiko, like most of the new arrivals in Lviv, did not leave Crimea due to any specific threat of violent attack, but to escape Russian rule that they see as illegitimate and which they associate with corruption, brutality and suppression of the media, civil society and political opposition.
That impression was reinforced by the manner of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea, which began with gunmen seizing buildings, troops and armoured vehicles flooding the peninsula, and a Russian nationalist whose party took only 4 per cent of votes in the last election swiftly being installed as premier.
Ukraine’s outgunned troops did not challenge Russian forces and there were few casualties, but the presence of thousands of armed men – including Moscow’s soldiers, masked local militia and Russian Cossacks – created what Human Rights Watch called a “climate of fear” in Crimea.
One Ukrainian soldier and one local man were killed by gunfire during the annexation, but two other incidents caused particular alarm among the region’s minority Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar communities, who mostly opposed joining Russia.
On March 3rd, unknown men bundled Reshat Ametov away from a pro-Ukrainian rally in the Crimean capital, Simferopol. His body was found two weeks later, allegedly with a stab wound to the eye and bearing other signs of torture.
Abducted and tortured
Ukrainian Maidan campaigner Andrei Shchekun says he was abducted and held for 11 days by pro-Russian forces in Crimea who beat him, shot him with air guns and attached electrodes to his body.
“The world community has to act to stop what is going on in Crimea and defend those people who do not want to become part of Russia but still have to live with the crisis,” Shchekun said this week.
Ruslan Minakov (32) says he did not feel directly threatened in Crimea, despite having sent supplies to Kiev’s Maidan and been one of many people who gave information to local Tatar radio stations which monitored the movements of Russian troops around the region.
"But when the Russian military arrived and I realised there would be no response from Ukraine, I decided with my family to leave. My business in Crimea is ruined and we don't want to live in Russia," he explains.
Minakov and his fellow Tatars comprise about 12 per cent of Crimea’s two million population, and they returned to their native land only in the 1990s, having been exiled to Siberia and Central Asia in 1944 for allegedly collaborating with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
“After the deportation, mistrust of Russia is in our genetic code,” Minakov says.
“And Crimea is very Russian,” he adds, reflecting on majority support in the region for annexation by Moscow.
“It was the place where Soviet pensioners and lots of old military men settled down. They raised their kids in a certain way, and it never really became part of Ukraine,” he explains, recalling the Kremlin’s transfer of Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republic in 1954.
“Ukraine made so many mistakes, and did nothing for Crimea since the Soviet days. But most of the people who voted to join Russia are nostalgic, and think they are going back to the Soviet Union. They don’t know what modern Russia is like.”
Crimea’s ethnic-Russian majority welcomed life under Moscow rule, believing it offers better prospects and protection from what many call “fascist” supporters of the Kiev government, which enjoys strong backing in Lviv.
Those fears have been stoked by Russian media and some symbols of the Maidan movement, which honour Ukrainian nationalists of the 1940s who sometimes fought alongside the Nazis against the Red Army in a bid to create an independent state around Lviv.
Sense of optimism
"Russia says we are living among fascists here in Lviv. But my children never saw a gun or an armoured vehicle until the Russians arrived in Crimea," says Minakov.
In the cobbled streets of Lviv, redolent of Krakow or Prague, Minakov is surrounded by tributes to protesters killed in Kiev, many of whom were from this city and region.
“My wife and I planned to move to Australia or Canada, but now we are starting to think differently,” he says.
“People here are helping us with everything, and there is a sense of freedom and optimism. We want to do something in return. Maybe this is how a nation is built.”
