NEW YORK
The Russian occupation of Crimea has brought a totalitarian regime that is worse than the Soviet Union, a legendary leader of the Crimean Tatars said Thursday.
"The current regime has all the features of the Soviet regime; it is also totalitarian, but at least during Soviet era there was no enforced disappearance of people," Mustafa Dzhemilev told a press conference at the United Nations in New York.
To international condemnation, Crimea was formally annexed by Moscow last March after an illegal self-rule vote on the heels of violent anti-government protests in Kiev that led to the overthrow of then-President Victor Yanukovich.
The peninsula's 300,000 strong Tatar population boycotted the March 16 referendum that saw the region vote for unification with Russia.
Dzhemilev expressed concerns that the situation in Crimea may turn into a protracted conflict similar to ones in Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia.
"Because every other day of the occupation brings suffering to our people ... the occupation forces Crimean Tatars to leave Crimea, their homeland, which was reclaimed with great efforts," he said in translated remarks.
The Crimean Tatars -- who experienced mass deportation to Central Asia in 1944 under Joseph Stalin's Soviet government -- pride themselves on having waged a successful campaign of passive resistance agasint Soviet authorities under Dzhemilev's leadership.
They are the native population of Crimea since the Mongol invasions in the 13th century.
Dzhemilev said Russia was deploying nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula – a development he called "alarming."
He said nuclear weapons were reintroduced in the village of Kiziltash, also known as Krasnokamianka, which hosted one of the bases where those weapons had been stored during the Soviet era.
"A part of Ukraine under Russian control is becoming a nuclear power again," he warned.
Ukraine gave up the world's third largest nuclear weapons stockpile between 1994 and 1996 under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine, signed by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Dzhemilev, also known by his adopted surname Kirimoglu -- son of Crimea -- is the former chairman of the Crimean Tatars' national assembly and a current Ukrainian MP.
