Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs is presented as an institution of Russian control in Crimea, with a history tied to the defection of Berkut units during the 2014 annexation. Its authority appears in the novel less through a formal organizational portrait than through the checkpoints, officers, and uncertain legal jurisdiction that shape people’s movement and the search for the disappeared.

Formation and institutional continuity

The accompanying account explains that Berkut was formed in 1992 as a special Ukrainian police agency, partly subordinate to Ukraine’s principal police force within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. During the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Berkut units stationed on the peninsula defected to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. They retained the Berkut name and thereafter functioned as the gendarmerie of Russian Crimea. This continuity of name alongside a change of allegiance makes the organization a marker of the political transfer of power: familiar uniforms and institutional labels persist, but serve a different state.

Checkpoints and the exercise of authority

The organization’s reach is conveyed through the practical demands of travel. At a checkpoint, soldiers inspect Sergey Sergeyich’s passport and question his route through territory associated with the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. One takes Sergeyich’s passport and mobile phone away to check them, while another orders him to pull aside for following traffic. The documents are eventually returned, but the interruption makes passage conditional on the checkpoint’s scrutiny and the soldiers’ interpretation of his circumstances.

At the border crossing into Crimea, Sergeyich passes under a sign identifying the Dzhankoy checkpoint as Russian. He recalls a nearby warning that Russian occupiers were eighteen kilometres away, a contrast that makes the border’s political meaning visible in the road itself. Later, when he accompanies Aisha toward the Ukrainian crossing, he parks beneath the border-post canopy and presents his own documents for inspection; he then drives slowly through the buffer zone, watching for her among pedestrians. These scenes show movement governed not only by a line on a map but by officers, paperwork, roads, and rules about where people may stop or travel.

Disappearance and jurisdiction

The organization’s political context also frames the search for Akhtem Mustafayev. Akhtem’s family tells Sergeyich that he was taken twenty months earlier. Aisylu recounts that three people were seized after travelling together to the mosque in Bakhchysarai: their car was left behind, and a child reportedly saw them being forced into a minibus. She believes the Cossacks took them and says they may have been sent to Russia. The account remains uncertain, with no confirmed destination or clear public resolution.

When Sergeyich asks an official about Akhtem, he is told that the case might concern either Crimean Self-Defence or the Cossacks, and that it is outside the office’s hands. The official’s careless reference to Akhtem’s wife as his widow briefly sounds like confirmation of his death, but he retracts it, emphasizing that the case is not closed. He says police have at least two dozen such cases. The later discovery that Akhtem had been found buried in the woods, killed long before, confirms the death without clarifying the full circumstances of his disappearance. Aisylu thanks Sergeyich for going to Simferopol, saying that without his visit Akhtem would not have been returned. The institution’s presence is thus associated with a landscape where authority is tangible at crossings, while responsibility for disappearances remains diffuse and answers arrive late.