The National Minority Rights Monitoring Group (head - Vyacheslav Likhachev) has published a preliminary report on hate crimes and other manifestations of xenophobia in Ukraine in the first half of 2015.

The most pressing issue in national minority rights is still the precarious status of the Crimean Tatars in Russian-occupied Crimea. The occupational government has been directing systematic efforts at suppressing the independent national movement, dismantling Crimean Tatar mass media and other institutions, and forbidding peaceful gatherings. These efforts can be interpreted as constituting an intentional policy. At the same time, activists of the Crimean Tatar movement have been falling prey to political repression, largely connected to the so-called “February 26 case.” The “February 26 case” was a rally organized by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people even before the open Russian incursion began. Its purpose was to stop pro-Russian forces from occupying the building of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea Parliament. The occupational government has classified this as a riot. This has become a pretext used to intimidate the Crimean Tatar people and to subject them to wide-scale repressions. Searches and arrests have been taking place all over the peninsula. There have also been recorded kidnappings and disappearings among the Crimean Tatars, which the occupational government has not investigated.

Separate incidents of street attacks motivated by racial, ethnic, and religious hatred have also been taking place in non-occupied Ukrainian territories. However, these incidents are isolated and the problem in general is not severe. In this context, the Monitoring Group would like to note an incident in Khakriv, where a cruel group beating of foreign students took place in June. Several people were seriously harmed in the course of the incident. Other attacks were also recorded, in some of which the assaulter employed close combat weapons.

LGBT issues became a subject of heated discussion in connection with a March of Equality that was held in Kyiv. Certain political powers and politicians used openly homophobic rhetoric when discussing the rally, and its participants were attacked by national radicals during and after the event itself. A policeman who had been tasked with keeping order at the rally was seriously harmed. Approximately 20 participants of the rally sustained trivial injuries.

Acts of anti-Semitic vandalism continue to be recorded by the monitoring program. The most common targets for vandalism are memorials to victims of the Holocaust. The monitoring group recommends that local authorities install surveillance cameras for commonly vandalized sites.

The puppet regimes of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, which have been created by Russia in the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, show a high leel of anti-Semitism in their public rhetoric. The LNR and DNR leaders actively exploit the alleged Jewish heritage of Ukrainian leaders to discredit Ukraine among their followers, and representatives of different groups vying for power inside the terroristic structures accuse each other of being Jewish as part of ther internal polemics.

The National Minorities Rights Monitoring Group was created by the Congress of National Communicities of Ukraine (CNCU) in April 2014. The Group continues the xenophobia monitoring project being commenced as part of the activities of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress since 2006. The Group’s materials can be found on the EAJC website.