The Dutch House of Representatives has passed a resolution recognizing the mass deportation of Crimean Tatars by the Soviet regime in 1944 as genocide.
This was reported by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Andriy Sybiha, and the information was also posted on the website of the Dutch Parliament.
"This is a powerful gesture of solidarity with the Crimean Tatar people, who are still being persecuted during Russiaʼs temporary occupation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula," the Ukrainian Foreign Minister wrote.
It is known that the deportation of Crimean Tatars as of June 2025 was recognized as genocide by the parliaments of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Canada, Poland, Estonia, and the Czech Republic.
Deportation of Crimean Tatars
On May 11, 1944, Joseph Stalin personally signed a resolution of the State Defense Committee to organize the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. The forced eviction operation under the control of the NKVD began in the early morning of May 18. Everyone was subject to deportation — children, women, the elderly and people with disabilities. The Tatars were transported by trucks to railway stations. From there, they were immediately or two or three days later sent to remote areas of Central Asia, the Urals and Siberia.
The main phase of the deportation operation ended on the evening of May 20. Almost 70 trains were sent from Crimea to the east. During the few weeks spent on the road, almost eight thousand people died, mostly the elderly and children. The Crimean Tatars who remained in Crimea were evicted during the deportation of Armenians, Greeks and Bulgarians from the peninsula at the end of June of the same year. Two hundred thousand people is the approximate number of deported Crimean Tatars, according to unofficial data there were twice as many.
After the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, on Stalinʼs orders, settlers were sent to the peninsula, primarily from the Russian hinterland — the Kursk, Voronezh, and Belgorod regions, the Volga region, and the northern regions.
Crimean Tatars were forbidden from returning to the peninsula until 1989. The deportation of Crimean Tatars was recognized as genocide by Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Canada. However, Russia, as the successor state of the USSR, did not conduct any investigation into this crime and did not pay any compensation.
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