Ukraine's parliament has approved a resolution recognizing the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars in 1944 as genocide.
The resolution adopted on November 12 also says that May 18 will be marked in Ukraine as the Day of Remembrance of the victims.
Crimean Tatar activists have been pressuring Ukrainian authorities for years to recognize the deportations as genocide.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the mass deportation of Crimean Tatars, the indigenous people of Crimea, on May 18, 1944 on the grounds that they had allegedly collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
More than 180,000 were deported to Central Asia and Siberia. An estimated 40 percent of those deportees died during the journey or within a year of being exiled.
Crimean Tatars were allowed to return to Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in the late 1980s, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Most Crimean Tatars openly opposed Russia's annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014.
