Paul Goble
Staunton, June 10 – The anti-Moscow Crimean Tatar partisan movement ATESH which arose after Putin began his Ukraine in 2022 is motivated by the fear that the Russian occupation will lead to the end of the Crimean Tatar nation. To prevent that, its leaders says, ATESH is not only operating in Crimea but in various regions of the Russian Federation.
Given the efforts of the Russian siloviki to destroy this group, information about its membership and specific actions is almost impossible to independently confirm; but Irina Khalip, a Novaya Gazeta journalist, has assembled what is known on the basis of talks with participants and experts (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/06/10/komanda-ogon).
Crimean resistance to the Russian occupation began in 2014 and then expanded after 2022, she says. In September of that year, she writes, “the ATESH movement was finally organized” as a separate body, dominated and led by Crimean Tatars but also including ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians on that Ukrainian peninsula.
Until recently, most of its actions, including destruction of occupation forces and infrastructure supporting them and the distribution of leaflets calling on others to resist, took place almost exclusively in Crimea and in occupied areas of Ukraine, now, its leaders say, they are increasingly active inside the Russian Federation itself.
ATESH has been criticized for some of its actions, including attacks on Russian military hospitals; but its supporters say that in times like the present, it has little choice but to take actions that have a chance to be effective in hurting the occupiers, mindful, in the words of one activist, that “if we don’t resist, we can simply disappear.”
“Ukrainians as a nation will not disappear,” he says, even if they are forced to give up the Donbas and Crimea; “but over us hangs the serious threat of disappearance, and therefore the activity of ATESH is very important for us … because it is something our own, Crimean Tatar.”
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