Trump administration officials have talked openly about the need for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia in order to bring the three-year war to an end, and the president himself has said in the past that he’s willing to consider Crimea as part of Russia. But since Trump took office, his advisers haven’t publicly divulged many specifics about what they might offer to Putin.
Ukrainians have “suffered greatly and their people have suffered greatly, and it’s hard in the aftermath of something like that to even talk about concessions,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters last week. “But that’s the only way this is going to end to prevent more suffering.”
A push by the US to formally recognize Crimea — which Russia invaded and illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014 — would likely draw tremendous pushback from Europe as well as Kyiv, where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has firmly resisted territorial concessions. The US, Ukraine, and much of the international community have recognized Crimea as Ukrainian territory despite Russia’s occupation of the peninsula.
At the same time, security experts have serious doubts about Ukrainian forces’ ability to retake Crimea through military means. Even Zelenskyy acknowledged last year that the Ukrainian territory could only be restored through diplomacy, something Russia is unlikely to agree to.
Trump first floated the prospect of recognizing Crimea as Russian territory years before Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While running for president in 2016, and subsequently during his first term, the president repeatedly said he’d “look at” whether the US would move to recognize it.
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said during a 2018 interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopolous. “And you have to look at that, also.”