Russian occupiers have been massively sending summonses to Crimean Tatars as part of the announced mobilisation, CrimeaSOS NGO has said, as quoted by Interfax-Ukraine.
"According to preliminary estimates, about 90% of summonses in Crimea were received by Crimean Tatars. At the same time, Crimean Tatars make 13-15% of the population of the peninsula. Such a scale of mobilisation can lead to a hidden genocide of the Crimean Tatar people," said the organization's analyst Yevhen Yaroshenko.
Under international law, one of the forms of genocide is the deliberate creation of living conditions designed to destroy an ethnic group in whole or in part.
"Crimean Tatars are citizens and indigenous people of Ukraine, whom Russia can purposefully destroy by throwing them into a war against their own state," Yaroshenko said.
In total, since the beginning of the "partial mobilisation" in Russia, about 5,000 residents of occupied Crimea have received summonses to join the Russian army.
Conscription of residents of the occupied territories to the occupying army is prohibited by Article 51 of the IV Geneva Convention and is a war crime. A separate war crime is the coercion of Ukrainian citizens to participate in hostilities against their own state.