Russia has stopped moving political prisoners out of occupied Crimea. For a week, no one convicted by the peninsula's Russian-controlled courts has been transferred off Crimea, halted first by Ukrainian strikes on the bridges to the mainland and now by a fuel shortage that has left nothing to run the prison vans, Crimean Tatar Mejlis member Eskender Bariiev says.

The frozen transfers are a byproduct of Ukraine's campaign to cut Crimea off. Weeks of strikes on bridges, fuel depots, and power plants have left the peninsula rationing electricity and out of petrol, and the occupation's prison logistics have seized up with everything else.

Detainees, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians alike, have been told their stay in Simferopol's detention center is extended indefinitely.

Strikes seal off Crimea

Ukraine has hammered Crimea's supply network for weeks. Its drones struck both ends of the Crimean Bridge corridor on 21 June and have since forced occupation authorities to halt civilian fuel sales and impose rolling blackouts, with petrol gone from open sale and trams stopped in Yevpatoria.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has described the campaign as turning Crimea from a peninsula into an island.

Detainees held in limbo

The halt traps two groups, Bariiev said: Crimeans sentenced by the occupation courts and Ukrainian citizens from newly seized territories who were brought to Crimea for hearings.

At first, he said, the occupiers held off transfers because moving prisoners under shelling was dangerous, though in his account, they feared for their own skins more than for the detainees.

Now there is simply no fuel for the transport vans. Russia has jailed scores of Crimean Tatars since 2014 on charges that Ukraine and rights groups call politically motivated.

Isolation exposes occupation strain

For Bariiev, the breakdown shows how brittle the occupation has become.

"The paralysis of penitentiary logistics has exposed the depth of the infrastructure crisis in Crimea," he wrote, saying the occupiers' military leadership cannot manage even basic internal functions and treats human life and rights as an afterthought.

The stalled transfers are one more sign of a peninsula sliding toward isolation.

The lower house of the Dutch parliament on June 19 officially recognized the 1944 mass deportation of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet Union as genocide, according to a statement from the parliamentary press service.

The motion cited precedent from other countries that have recognized the forced deportations as genocide, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

In the adopted text, Dutch lawmakers declared that the Soviet-led deportation of Crimean Tatars, which took place between May 18 and 21, 1944, constitutes genocide by contemporary legal and historical definitions.

The 1944 deportation was carried out under direct orders from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who labeled the entire Crimean Tatar population as traitors following the peninsula's liberation from Nazi occupation.

Over 190,000 Tatars were forcibly removed from Crimea in a matter of days, though some estimates place the number closer to 430,000, and sent to remote areas in Central Asia, mainly Uzbekistan, in brutal conditions that led to mass deaths.

The document pointed to the ongoing repression of Crimean Tatars under Russian occupation since 2014. It said that "many Crimean Tatars have been unjustly imprisoned, subjected to torture by the Russian Federation, or forcibly disappeared," and added that "Russia has likely continued a policy of genocide against Crimean Tatars."

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha welcomed the decision, calling it "a powerful gesture of solidarity with the Crimean Tatar people, who are still facing persecution under Russia’s temporary occupation of the Ukrainian Crimea peninsula."

Sybiha noted that the Netherlands is now the seventh country to formally recognize the deportation as genocide and urged other nations to follow suit.

"Recognizing this historical injustice is critical not only for establishing truth and justice, but also for preventing future atrocities," the minister wrote.

Ukraine's parliament recognized the deportation as genocide in 2015 and established May 18 as the official Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Crimean Tatar People.

Who are the Crimean Tatars?

Crimean Tatars are one of Ukraine’s indigenous peoples who have been central to Crimea’s history for many centuries.

The Kyiv IndependentAnastasiia Lapatina