RFE/RL: Crimean Tatars shaken by leader's confinement to mental asylum

When a court in Russian-annexed Crimea ordered activist Ilmi Umerov to a psychiatric clinic for a month of assessment tests, the decision sent shock waves through the peninsula's indigenous ethnic Tatar minority.

For two and a half decades, authorities in Crimea have refrained from the routine Soviet-era practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill, condemning them to life in an insane asylum.