The Trump administration’s desire to broker an end to the fighting and killing in Ukraine is admirable, but the way that it has gone about it has been problematic, to say the least. According to the text of a U.S. peace proposal published by Reuters on April 25, the United States would—in exchange for a permanent cease-fire—provide de jure recognition of Russian control of Crimea and de facto recognition of Russian control of most of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Kherson.
This would fly in the face of a 2018 declaration by then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stating that the “United States reaffirms as policy its refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law” and “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”
Recognizing Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea would contravene international law, as Pompeo noted. It would encourage other authoritarian regimes to seize land—say, China with Taiwan—and plant the idea that if they hold out long enough, then they can achieve eventual U.S. recognition, too.
This is both bad for U.S. national security and a terrible precedent to set. The idea of the United States recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea also sticks in the craw of Ukraine’s leaders and people.
That’s because the Crimean Peninsula was the place where this all began. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine started in Crimea in February 2014. By March, Russia had illegally annexed the peninsula and moved into the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east. More than 14,000 Ukrainians were killed between that time and the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022. Since then, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed and many more wounded.
A March 2022 poll published by the independent Ukrainian sociological organization Rating Group found that 80 percent of respondents said that Ukraine should do everything possible to bring Crimea—and the Russian-occupied eastern Donbas—back under Ukraine’s control.
“While recent polling shows the number of Ukrainians willing to make some territorial concessions to end the war has risen,” journalists at the Kyiv Independent wrote recently, a majority — 51 percent — “still oppose the idea under any circumstances.”
The future of Crimea and the other occupied areas is not just about territory. Millions of Ukrainians live there, and consigning them to live under brutal Russian oppression would be unconscionable for any Ukrainian leader.
U.S. President Donald Trump had an important opportunity to reframe his thinking toward the war that Russia launched against Ukraine during his 15-minute one-on-one meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when they were both in Rome on April 26 for Pope Francis’s funeral. No cameras recorded their conversation, and no aides or vice presidents were around to stir the pot—in marked contrast to the two leaders’ last meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 28.
In Rome, Zelensky had the chance to convince Trump that Ukraine has always wanted the war to end—but in a way that ensures that Russia doesn’t attack again.
But the day after his meeting with Zelensky, Trump claimed that he “thinks” the Ukrainian president is prepared to give up Crimea to Russia as part of a possible deal—despite the fact that Zelensky has rejected such an idea for months and Putin has demonstrated zero interest in ending the war, instead continuing his unremitting bombing of Ukraine.
A particularly deadly attack in Kyiv that killed 12 people just days before Trump’s meeting with Zelensky in Rome prompted the U.S. president to write on Truth Social: “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’ Too many people are dying!!!”
Too many people indeed are dying because of Putin—and yet the U.S. proposal tilts heavily in Moscow’s favor, and not just on the Crimea issue.
The proposed deal would also preclude Ukraine from seeking membership in NATO, granting Russia de facto veto over Ukraine’s aspirations and giving Putin something that he has long wanted. The draft calls for Ukraine to receive “robust security guarantees” from “an ad hoc grouping of European states plus willing non-European states”—but the United States is not explicitly mentioned. The plan also decrees that Ukraine “be fully reconstructed and compensated financially” without saying how, and it would lift the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia since the initial invasion in 2014.
Meanwhile, despite these favorable terms at the bargaining table, Russia’s obstinance hasn’t changed. Putin continues to defy Trump’s push to end the war, reportedly continuing to insist that Russia must take full control of all of the four regions of Ukraine that it doesn’t totally occupy as part of any agreement to end his war, according to Bloomberg.
The Russian leader also still refuses the U.S. call for a 30-day cease-fire that Ukraine has already agreed to. Instead, his latest gambit is proposing a unilateral cease-fire for May 8 through May 10, which would overlap with his World War II victory parade scheduled for May 9 in Moscow. Zelensky wasn’t falling for it—nor should the United States.
“[F]or some reason everyone is supposed to wait until May 8 before ceasing fire — just to provide Putin with silence for his parade,” Zelensky wrote on Monday. “We value human lives, not parades. That’s why we believe — and the world believes — that there is no reason to wait until May 8.”
In an interview with Brazil’s O Globo newspaper this week, Putin’s foreign minister reiterated Russia’s insistence that Ukraine be forced to reduce its military and engage in “denaazification,” which is Kremlin-speak for demanding a change in Ukraine’s government.
Putin clearly wants to keep slaughtering innocent Ukrainians between now and May 8 and then resume after May 10. It is Putin, not Zelensky, who is responsible for the ongoing bloodshed. That has been true from Day 1. Trump, through a spokesperson, rightly responded to Putin’s latest gambit by insisting on a “permanent ceasefire and to bring this conflict to a peaceful resolution.”
That resolution should include forcing Russia to compensate Ukraine for the terrible damage, destruction, and loss of life that Putin has inflicted on Ukrainians. The way to do that it is to seize the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets in Western financial institutions and make them available to Ukraine. Only after that should there be any consideration of partial sanctions relief. Meanwhile, an economic agreement signed between Washington and Kyiv on April 30 gives the United States access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits and implies undefined U.S. support for Ukraine.
Putin has never viewed Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state after the breakup of the Soviet Union. But he also worried that a successful, democratic Ukraine on his doorstep could be a threatening alternative to the corrupt and authoritarian system that he oversees in Russia. And because of its history and strategic importance, handing over Crimea to Russia would be a huge political and security victory for Putin.
Crimea was part of the Ottoman Empire until Russia seized it in 1783. It became part of the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics after the formation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, until Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev transferred control to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. As the Soviet Union teetered in 1991, Crimea joined the rest of Ukraine in supporting independence in a Dec. 1 referendum.
Following the Soviet Union’s breakup, the Russian leadership recognized Crimea as Ukrainian under numerous accords and treaties. Russian maintained its Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol, an arrangement that was extended in 2010 in a controversial deal agreed to by Ukraine’s pro-Russian former leader Viktor Yanukovych.
But Putin was spooked after Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, a series of massive protests in the winter of 2014-15 that were prompted by Putin pressuring Yanukovych to not sign deals with the European Union. Only two years before that, Putin faced large demonstrations in Russia against rigged and fraudulent elections that returned him and a pliant parliament to power. He feared that revolution in Ukraine could spread to Russia.
Putin subsequently used the Black Sea base at Sevastopol that Russia had maintained as a staging point for his takeover of Crimea in 2014. It then became a launching pad for Russian missile attacks after the full-scale invasion of the whole country in 2022.
When Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were illegally annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the United States refused to recognize their absorption. It took nearly five decades for these states to regain their full independence, but the U.S. position was the right one. The United States should show the same determination and patience when it comes to Ukraine and all of its territory illegally seized by Russia—including Crimea.
Putin thought that he could get away with taking over all of Ukraine in the aftermath of the abysmal U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. He also mistakenly thought that the invasion would be easy, over in a matter of days. The Ukrainians have proven him very wrong.
After his meeting with Trump on Saturday, Zelensky wrote on X, “Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results. Thank you @POTUS.”
If their Rome meeting leads the United States to reconsider its plans to recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory and to view Putin—not Ukraine—as the guilty party, then it will indeed have proved to be historic. Above all, Putin should not be rewarded for the alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide that he and his forces have committed in a war that he started.
We should all hope that the Trump administration gets this right.
The post The U.S. Must Not Gift Crimea to Putin appeared first on Foreign Policy.
