Russia is trying to change the demographic map of the illegally annexed Crimea by resettling its citizens to the peninsula. Thereby, Moscow wants to increase the number of supporters of the occupying power.

"This is a practice of an occupying power when it replaces the population of an occupied territory with its population in order to change the demographic map of the area. By resettling its citizens to the peninsula, Russia is certainly violating the Fourth Geneva Convention which protects civilians during the war. But, in fact, it is also a war crime within the meaning of Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. So we can talk about the responsibility of Russia as a state for such actions and possible criminal liability for Russian citizens who approve such decisions in the future. It is clear that such resettlement aims to change the composition of the Crimean population in order to have more supporters of the occupying power," Anton Korynevych, the representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, said on the air of UATV channel.

According to him, UN Secretary-General António Guterres mentioned in his report a number of violations committed by the Russian Federation in occupied Crimea, including the oppression of Crimean Tatars, the ban on receiving education in the Ukrainian language, the military conscription of Crimeans to the Russian army and so on. Another violation is that more than 140,000 citizens of the Russian Federation have been resettled to Crimea since the beginning of the illegal annexation of the peninsula, Korynevych added.

As reported, in March 2019, Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People Refat Chubarov stated that "the most cautious estimates suggest that up to 500,000 people have been resettled to Crimea."

At the same time, according to the leader of the Crimean Tatar people Mustafa Dzhemilev, the Russian authorities have resettled almost one million people to Crimea.

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