Russian state media reported Monday that the country has put the Ukrainian singer Jamala on its federal wanted list on vague criminal charges. The singer’s name and picture were found in the database of the Interior Ministry, but there was no other information about what she was accused of.
With her song “1944,” which describes how Stalin expelled the Crimean Tatars, Jamala, a singer with Crimean Tatar ancestry, won the 2016 Eurovision competition. In her performance, she made references to how the Crimean Tatars are treated now, under Russian rule.
Moscow used the Crimean Peninsula, which is officially a part of Ukraine but which Russia seized in 2014, as a crucial training ground for its full attack in February 2022.
Human Rights Watch says that since 2014
Russian authorities have “relentlessly persecuted” Crimean Tatars for being against Russian rule. They have done this by calling politically active members of the community extremists and terrorists and harassing, threatening, banning the media, prosecuting, torturing, and disappearing them.
Jamala wasn’t allowed to go back to Crimea, but she just put out a new record that is all about protecting traditional Crimean Tatar music that is in danger.
She has also worked to bring the war in Ukraine to the attention of people around the world.
She told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before her trip to the U.S. in 2022, “No matter where I am, the first thing I do is remind people that foreigners came to my house to kill and mutilate life and to destroy and rewrite my culture.”” It took place in 1944, 2014, and now again.” No one in Ukraine is stupid enough to think that this couldn’t happen to them if bad people weren’t stopped and punished for their crimes.
When the singer heard that she was being charged with a crime, she put up a picture of herself in front of the Sydney Opera House on her Instagram story, along with the title of an article about the case and a facepalm emoji.