Cadaquès, August 23, 2023

Dear readers,

I'm writing this letter from Spain, where Yanis and I are spending a few days to get away from Paris. We're on the east coast, which, like many places on the Mediterranean, reminds me of Crimea with the smell of heat-crushed pine trees and the sparkling sea. It makes me think about the Crimean Tatars, who were victims of Stalin's 1944 ethnic cleansing operation, many of whom were deported to Uzbekistan. How does it feel to be uprooted and unable to return home? I don't know what would become of me if I couldn't return to my country, if I no longer had a place I could call "my home," "my land." The Crimean Tatars were allowed to return home in the mid-1980s. But today, they are once again being oppressed and persecuted. There is little information on the subject, but according to Tatar activists, the russians [Olga and Sasha chose not to capitalize "putin," "russian" and "russia"] have been conducting a policy of persecution against the Tatars in Crimea since its annexation in 2014, while enlisting many of them into their army.

I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend Tatar cuisine. Especially the famous chebureki, huge fried ravioli stuffed with lamb, or the burma, a snail-shaped meat pie. I've eaten them a thousand times in Crimea and Kyiv. Yanis has also become a fan of chebureki now.

Trying to stay positive, there's some news I want to share with you: The Azov commanders have returned to the front! After being taken prisoner by the Russians after the fall of Mariupol, they spent months in Turkey and were supposed to stay there until the war's end, but Erdogan let them return to Ukraine, and they soon rejoined their battalion.

Sasha was supposed to come in September for the release of the book compiling our weekly journal published in Le Monde since the start of the war and over the course of a year, but she canceled the trip. I would have been so happy for her to be there, but I feel she's tired. I can understand why she doesn't want to make this exhausting and costly trip again.

I've spoken to my father several times in the last few days. I've rarely felt him so demoralized. He tells me we Ukrainians are stuck between the front line and the drone attacks and that on the other side, there's Europe and the United States, who could be supplying arms, but at their own pace. And that pace is slow, very slow. I'm familiar with Europe and its bureaucracy, but when I open Facebook, my feed is filled with photos of men killed at the front and children killed by Russian rockets. The number of people we're losing makes us very pessimistic. Are we sacrificing an entire generation?

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