Russia’s invason of Crimea poses a new challenge to Ukraine’s Tatars, an indigenous ethnic minority on the peninsula that returned to the nation in the 1980s after their deportation in the early 1940s by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Refat Chubarov, chairman of the Mejlis, the representative body of Crimean Tatars, says he is afraid that Russians will accuse the ethnic group of being a threat to ethnic Russians. So he is asking Tatars to minimize their time in public and avoid confrontations.