By Published April 12. Updated April 12 at 9:24 am Children hold the Crimean Tatar flag on Independence Square in Kyiv on May 18, 2020 during a rally marking the 76th anniversary of the deportation of the indigenous population of Crimea by the Soviet Union. Photo by
Volodymyr Petrov
Samira Aliyeva, a fourth-grade student in Russian-occupied Crimea, should have been praised for her homework assignment about her great-grandfather, a WWII veteran and victim of Stalin’s 1944 Deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people. Instead, her teacher traumatized Samira and the other Crimean Tatar children in the class by repeating, as fact, the lies used by Stalin’s regime to justify an act of genocide. The incident has aroused outrage, but no official comment, and there is nothing to suggest that it could not happen again. It was only after a major scandal in 2019 that similar lies were
Britain and the United States "firmly oppose Russia's campaign to destabilize Ukraine" and call on Russia to de-escalate the situation, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said.
By Dimitri Simes | April 7, 2021 | 8:30pm EDT
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
Moscow (CNSNews.com) – Russia has launched a new round of large-scale military exercises amid renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine and reports of a military buildup near the Ukrainian border.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon called on Moscow “to make their intentions more clear as to what they’re doing with this array of forces along the border.” Earlier, the U.S. European Command raised its watch level for Ukraine to potential imminent crisis, its highest level of alert.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday armed forces would conduct more than 4,000 exercises in April aimed at testing their “combat readiness.” He added that the drills would take place across Russia and involve all branches of the forces.
Crimea has always been an arid region with comparatively little rainf and snowfall. What rivers there are are significantly smaller in volume than the Dnipro, for example. In the 1950s, only 155 out of 926 settlements had consistent access to clean drinking water. This prompted Soviet authorities to begin constructing the Crimean Canal in 1957 – three years after administration of Crimea was transferred to the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Completed in 1971, the canal diverted water from the Kahkovka Reservoir in southern Ukraine, fed by the Dnipro. With independence, maintenance of the canal was neglected and by 2013, water flows were just one-third of 1980s levels. Despite this, the situation did not reach critical levels until the canal was fully dammed in 2014.