Lia Gazi is a Crimean Tatar activist. Her family was deported from Crimea in the 1940s amid Stalin’s mass deportations of Crimean Tatars to remote parts of the Soviet Union, part of the campaign to subjugate the group and erase its history and culture. Lia is the first generation in her family to be born in her native Crimea since then. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, her father refused to live under occupation or accept a Russian passport. The family relocated to Kherson, Ukraine. In 2016, her family faced interrogation and new obstacles when crossing the border to come back to the peninsula, repeating a centuries-long pattern of abuse and repression that the Crimean Tatars have faced. In 2022, Russian military forces occupied Kherson, and her family had to flee again.

Since leaving Crimea, Gazi has documented her family’s history and the history of Russia’s persecution of Crimean Tatars, including through cultural erasure, abductions, and extrajudicial killings. Gazi actively supports Crimea returning back to Ukraine, and she highlights the unbreakable bond between the peninsula, its ethnic minorities, and Ukraine.