Children of Crimean political prisoners need mental rehabilitation and recognition — Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People

Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, Refat Chubarov, has highlighted the urgent need to rehabilitate children of Crimean political prisoners, emphasizing that their primary struggle is psychological rather than material.

In the eleventh year of the temporary occupation of Crimea, 367 children were left without a father, 246 of whom are minors. For many of them, searches, arrests, and trials have become part of a childhood spent under the pressure of fear, anxiety, and constant stress, human rights defenders explain.

“The most terrible thing is that they live in constant stress and fear because they have experienced such cataclysms, and it doesn’t just pass,” Chubarov said on October 21, in a comment for ZMINA during a photo exhibition “The Childhood They Never Had” in Kyiv, dedicated to the children of Crimean Tatar political prisoners who are growing up without their parents.

Refat Chubarv noted that while some children of political prisoners live in families where adults can provide support, their living conditions vary and aren’t necessarily worse than those of other children materially.

Before the full-scale invasion, organizations attempted to take these children away for mental rehabilitation, at least for a month.

“In recent years, this has become very difficult. We manage to take out 50-100 children” he said.

Chubarov stressed that the most important support for these children is knowing that people are talking about their situation.

“If information is somehow distributed in Crimea—parents show it, it appears on websites — this will be great support for the children,” he explained. “It’s very important for these children that people are talking about their parents.”

Recounting a meeting with approximately 50 children a year ago, Chubarov shared what he told them: “I will talk about your parents, who have been treated very unjustly. There are people in your life who think this is acceptable. You have teachers at school who look at you with contempt. You have classmates nearby who can say things that hurt you. But you must know that your parents are heroes. They are heroes because they chose dignity, and they haven’t broken where everyone else breaks.”

The impact was profound, Chubarov said.

“About a month or a couple of weeks after they returned, their mothers flooded me with phone calls and said these children were struck by these words. They repeated everywhere that parents are heroes,” Chubarov recalled.

He urged continued public discussion of these families’ situations, noting that the children closely follow such recognition of their parents’ sacrifice.

According to the Mission of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, as of October 20, 2025, the Russian occupiers have illegally imprisoned 222 Crimean residents, of whom 133 are Crimean Tatars.

The exhibition “The Childhood They Never Had” features photographs from 2020 and 2025, as well as children’s messages to their parents. The 2020 photos were first presented in Emine Dzheppar’s exhibition project “Being true to yourself is not a crime” dedicated to the persecution of Crimean Tatars in the temporarily occupied Crimea.

The exhibition will run for two weeks, until November 5, at the Museum of Outstanding Figures of Ukrainian Culture, located at 93 Saksahanskoho Street, Kyiv (the building of the L. Ukrainka Museum). Admission is free.

Opening hours: Wednesday to Monday, from 10:00 to 18:00, closed on Tuesdays.

Each visitor will also have the opportunity to write words of support for political prisoners and place them in the Letters to Free Crimea initiative box, which will be available in the museum for the duration of the exhibition.

The new exhibition was created with the financial support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.

Photo credits: Mykola Myrnyi, ZMINA