Russia stole Crimea from Ukraine, and if U.S. President Donald Trump recognizes Moscow’s land grab as part of a peace deal, he will risk destroying war crimes investigations, weakening the rule of law and setting a dangerous precedent for other aggressive powers.
In April, the Trump administration floated the idea of recognizing that Crimea is legally Russian as part of an agreement ending the war in Ukraine.
“It’s a very dangerous precedent if such things are even included in the agenda of peace negotiations,” warned Iryna Marchuk, associate professor of international criminal law at the University of Copenhagen. “This should not be something on the table.”
At stake is a principle that has governed international relations since the end of World War II — that borders cannot be changed by force.
The might-makes-right message would apply not only to Russia but also to China’s threat to seize Taiwan, as well as to the countries that Trump has mused might be annexed by the U.S.: Greenland, Canada and Panama.
“It shapes how we think about the rules,” said Lauri Mälksoo, professor of international law at the University of Tartu in Estonia. “Where will this set a precedent? It becomes harder to criticize a midsized power for trying something similar in its own backyard, because they can point to this and say, ‘Look what happened there — why can’t I do the same?’”
The Kremlin’s legal effort
Russia has been trying to legalize its annexation and bristles at any setback. When the International Criminal Court classified Russia’s actions in Crimea as an occupation, Moscow quit the body in 2016.
It insists that official recognition of Crimea — which it has transformed into a major military base since 2014 — is essential to resolving its war against Ukraine. In abortive peace talks with Kyiv following its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia demanded that Ukraine recognize Crimea as part of the Russian Federation.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has been fighting Russian aggression in the international courts since 2014, winning several rulings establishing that Crimea — along with parts of eastern and southern Ukraine — are temporarily and illegally occupied.
A 2021 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights found that Russia was responsible for human rights violations in Crimea — including torture, unlawful detention and enforced disappearances. That established a key precedent by recognizing that Moscow had effectively seized control of the peninsula from Ukraine by force on Feb. 27, 2014 and not via a legally flawed referendum in March of that year, as Russia claims.
That same legal reasoning — that Russia has illegally occupied Ukrainian territory — underpins other key prosecutions, including of the forced deportation of Ukrainian citizens. Recognizing that Russia legally owns Crimea would undercut that effort.
“If Russia were sovereign in this territory, the court would not consider such violations,” noted Darya Svyrydova, a Kyiv-based lawyer originally from Crimea who has worked extensively on Crimea cases. “These violations are markers, which actually tell us through judicial institutions that this is not the territory of Russia.”
In practical terms, this would mean that policies such as forcing Ukrainians to accept Russian passports or deporting Ukrainian citizens to prisons thousands of kilometers away in Russia would no longer be legally contestable, Svyrydova said. Russia would be seen as exercising its sovereignty, which includes the power to make constitutional changes and impose citizenship — as long as these actions respect basic human rights, added Mario Pasquale Amoroso, a legal assistant at the U.N. International Law Commission.
Ukrainian legal efforts have not just looked for accountability — they’ve also exposed Kremlin propaganda, including claims that Crimea joined Russia through an act of self-determination, or that Russia is merely protecting Russian speakers. During hearings at the ECHR prior to 2022, Russia repeatedly relied on these narratives, said Marharyta Sokorenko, a representative of Ukraine before the ECHR.
“Our litigation is about the establishment of true facts. It’s about the battle not just for justice, but the battle for truth,” she said.
Russia first conquered Crimea in 1783 under Catherine the Great and held it until it was gifted to Ukraine in 1956 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev — a decision Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced.
Crimea, along with the rest of Ukraine, voted in favor of independence in a 1991 referendum, and had the status of an autonomous republic within Ukraine until it was seized by Russia in 2014 following street protests that ousted a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv.
If Russia gains legal recognition of its hold on Crimea, especially retroactively to 2014, “It would mean that all official acts that happened there in Crimea are attributable to Russia and not have anything to do with Ukraine anymore,” said Jan Wouters, professor of international law at KU Leuven in Belgium. “It could legitimize acts of the Russian government there.”
A weakening consensus
With pressure growing for peace talks, Ukraine has publicly and forcefully ruled out concessions on Crimea’s status. “There’s nothing to talk about here. This is against our constitution,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in response to Trump’s remarks.
“This is our red line: no recognition,” Anton Korynevych, Ukraine’s ambassador-at-large and chair of the core group working to establish a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression, told POLITICO.
That firm stance on Crimea intersects with broader legal efforts to hold Russia accountable. European nations earlier this month announced the creation of a new special tribunal that could offer Ukraine a new legal pathway to challenge Russia’s actions under international law.
Scheduled to begin work as early as next year, the tribunal will focus on prosecuting the crime of aggression. A key question it faces is temporal: Will it address only the full-scale invasion that began in February 2022, or also include Russia’s actions starting with the 2014 annexation of Crimea?
Korynevych indicated it will do the latter. “For Ukraine it was always very obvious and our strong position that the aggression started in 2014,” he said. “It’s very important that the tribunal will be able to cover events which happened before 2022.”
The tribunal will be hosted by the Council of Europe. But in a sign of its new direction under Trump, the United States has withdrawn its support, scaling back its involvement in international legal efforts and even siding with Moscow in two recent United Nations resolutions related to the war.
This shift in U.S. positioning carries weight. On the global stage of international law, moves by a major power like the U.S. to question responsibility for the war or float recognition of Crimea as Russian could have serious ripple effects, both politically and economically, by undermining the fragile international consensus.
“From a legal point of view, Crimea remains occupied,” Svyrydova said, “but the political narratives of one of the key players who supported [Ukraine’s] territorial integrity will change, economic narratives will change and, of course, all this will put a lot of pressure on the consensus of a large number of countries. This will affect the political resolutions of international organizations, for example, the U.N.”
In the short term, companies banned by European sanctions might seek to return to do business in Crimea, Svyrydova said. In the longer term, it could undermine international law.
“It is obvious that this will be a precedent and a temptation for other countries to raise their territorial claims by force,” she said.
The first to suffer from such shifts, warned former Crimean political prisoner Nariman Dzhelyal, will be those still living under occupation. Dzhelyal, now the Ukrainian ambassador to Turkey, was arrested in Crimea in 2021 after attending the Crimea Platform in Kyiv, a major Ukrainian diplomatic effort to consolidate international consensus that Crimea is Ukraine. Released in a prisoner exchange last year, he is dismayed that the cause he went to prison for is being undermined.
“It’s a huge slight to those who are in Crimea. Leaving territory and Ukrainian citizens under occupation means a continuation of repression,” he said. “If Trump does what he has suggested, it’s not just terrible from the point of view of global politics, it’s terrible for concrete individuals.”
Dzhelyal believes any such compromise in the name of stopping the war would be in vain anyway. “Even if the U.S. recognizes Crimea as Russian, it won’t stop Putin, because his goal isn’t Crimea — it’s much bigger,” he concluded.
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