Real estate prices in Crimea shot up by 50 percent in dollar terms in the year after the annexation. Prices skyrocketed even further in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic prevented Russians from accessing their favourite European resorts.
Crimea’s most expensive home on the market, priced at £14 million, offers an estate of three villas in Livadia, next to the summer residence of Russia’s last Tsar.
Moscow-installed authorities have shown over the years that they will welcome wealthy Russians who want to snap up sea-view apartments. But anyone who dares to spoil the idyll is severely punished.
“I’ve felt anxiety living in Crimea since 2014,” Elvira, a 36-year-old teacher from the resort town of Alushta, told the Telegraph.
“First, people with a public profile started to disappear – those who peacefully protested against Crimea joining Russia. Then ordinary young men: Some of them were found dead. Some are still missing.”
‘A black hole’
The crackdown zeroed in on Crimean Tatars, an indigenous community that still carries the trauma of wartime deportation from the peninsula by Josef Stalin.
At least 40 Crimean Tatars have been convicted of extremism and terrorism since 2014, some sentenced to as much as 19 years in jail. Many more are on trial.
Yulia Gobrunova, a senior Ukraine and Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, calls Crimea a “black hole for human rights,” where independent media has been stamped out and all but a handful activists have fled or been jailed.
While a number of vocal Crimean Tatars fled to Kyiv or western Ukraine, many more grudgingly took Russian citizenship to continue to live on the land from which their parents or grandparents were deported 80 years ago.
“We are torn between the ideals of our ancestors – living in our homeland – and giving opportunities to our kids,” a 25-year-old Crimean Tatar woman who asked to be identified as Aliye told The Telegraph.
“I hope we can make it work.”
The Telegraph has withheld the name of the Crimea-based journalist who wrote this article for security reasons
