Crimean political prisoner Oleg Sentsov: «We'll come back as winners»

This material was prepared as part of the «How We Will Get Crimea Back» project — an initiative of Ukrainian journalists from Crimea. It’s goal is to find instruments and solutions for the de-occupation and reintegration of the peninsula.

Author: Oleg Sentsov, Ukrainian filmmaker, author, Crimean political prisoner

Our comeback is not a matter of time, it’s a matter of our state. It’s the question of restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity and restoring justice. Putin also thought he was acting justly when he seized Crimea, referring to some historical events of long-gone days and long-gone countries and ignoring the modern-day agreements and recognised borders. He seized and stole that which didn’t belong to him from a neighbour he used to call his friend and brother. Well, cannibals have their logic too and deem their actions just.

Due to a change of government and a change of regime and being at a historical turning point after the revolution that took place in the country, Ukraine was not ready to withstand the occupation with arms. And it wasn’t prepared not just in a military sense, but in a psychological sense too. To start shooting at the people you used to deem close is hard.

If Ukraine wasn’t ready to shoot at the Russians, it is no wonder that the rest of the civilised world was not prepared to shoot at them too. Crimea was lost, using the aggressor’s military power, Ukraine was eradicated from there. The world said it was concerned. It spoke of sanctions thinking this would be the end of it all. But this was just the beginning. It couldn’t be any other way when someone forcefully changes the rules and principles of the world’s existence.

Then the Donbas happened and the shootdown of the Malaysian Boeing. Thousands of deaths and an attempt to seize, this time, half of Ukraine. When dictators are allowed to bite off a finger, they want the rest of the hand too, and won’t stop until they eat you entirely. A beast will only understand the language of force.

We withstood only thanks to the fact that we started resisting. We didn’t lose because we started shooting. The west, of course, didn’t start shooting with us. Nobody wants to die in someone else’s war, especially when the enemy’s argument will always be the possession of nuclear weapons. Our own nuclear weapons were given away to our future enemy in exchange for a guarantee of security. But when this guarantee was violated, nobody wanted to pay the bill. The bill was paid by the Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers who took up weapons and stopped the country from being torn apart by the enemy.

These days, the blood is not shed the same way it was shed in the war’s first days. Grad rocket launchers no longer shoot from Russian territory. And only a weeping of a mother notified about her son dying at this unproclaimed war can be heard — the war that started with the seizing of Crimea.

We do not know when this war will end, but we do know that it will and who will win. The war with Russia will finally end in Ukrainian Crimea, in my homeland, in a place where we’ll definitely come back. We’ll come back as winners.