#Ukrainian PEN

Suriya and the children only managed to settle in the new house in 2015. Sheikhaliev never got to enjoy it with his family. To live in his own house. To hear the laughter of his grandson, who will soon turn one in October 2024

On October 10, 2017, as he returned home, Asanov leaned close to his four-year-old daughter, Safiye, inhaling the familiar scent of her dark hair. He whispered, “I feel for those who have been deprived of their freedom. I want every prisoner to embrace their children and feel their scent as soon as possible”

On a piece of white sheet, he drew with a black pen the wagons in which the Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea. On each of them are written the years of deportation: 1944 and 2014

Saliyev found himself at his first protest campaign when he was only seven months old. Things like this happen when your mother is an activist in the Crimean Tatar national movement advocating for the return of her people to their homeland

As his letters reveal, he’s also inspired by the sense of continuity in his struggle. He knows that his grandparents and parents fought for the cause in exile, and he now continues the fight side-by-side with his own generation

Late at night on September 4, 2021, the Federal Security Service (FSB) officers burst into the Akhtem family’s apartment. It was not even midnight, and Akhtem and his wife had just gone to bed. The silence was shattered by screams and footsteps as armed men in balaclavas entered the room—more than ten of them

She was kidnapped at a bus stop in Koktebel and sentenced to almost seven years in prison. This is the story of a citizen journalist whose case contains zero details about explosive devices allegedly found in her eyeglass case—and a whole volume of references to her interviews in the media

During the first year after Mustafayev’s arrest, his sons played a game of “house search.” They built a prison out of colorful building blocks and “freed” their father