Shunning diplomacy, Ukraine plans to take Crimea ‘hostage’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is ruling out negotiations with Russia until it fully withdraws from all captured territory, including Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Moscow following the 2014 Maidan coup.

“We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea,” Zelensky told CNN. “And while Crimea is under the Russian occupation, it means only one thing: the war is not over yet.”

Zelensky’s hard-line could just be bluster: adopting a maximalist position in public before taking a softer line behind closed doors. But there is ample evidence that Zelensky has no interest in diplomacy with Russia, and every intent to fulfill the agenda of the Ukrainian far-right and their bipartisan enablers in Washington.

Zelensky, an adviser explained earlier this year, “has a clear understanding what Ukraine should do. There is no ambiguity: There is no peace with Russia, and Ukraine must arm itself to the teeth.”

According to the Washington Post, a key component of the Ukrainian government’s strategy is to surround Crimea with heavy weaponry, thereby “holding hostage the peninsula that is home to Russia’s prized Black Sea Fleet.” As one senior Ukrainian official explained: “Russia will only negotiate if it feels threatened.” The plan was previewed four months ago by senior US official Victoria Nuland, who declared that “Ukraine is not going to be safe unless Crimea is at a minimum, at a minimum, demilitarized,” and that “we are supporting that.”

Ukraine’s professed intent to hold Crimea “hostage” is not just a reflection of Russia’s sizeable military presence there. It also reflects the quietly acknowledged fact that Russia has overwhelming popular support, as multiple US government-funded polls have found. “Crimeans were and remain mostly in favor of the Russian annexation,” Foreign Affairs noted in 2020.

After Russian seized Crimea in 2014, Ukrainian officials likewise conceded that Crimea’s population “massively” supported Russia (Valentin Nalyvaichenko, the head of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency). “The majority of the Crimean population is pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian,” Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said. “There’s a reason why there was not an armed invasion of Crimea,” former President Barack Obama explained in a recent interview with CNN, “because Crimea was full of a lot of Russian speakers and there was some sympathy to the view that Russia was representing its interests.”

Zelensky himself once spoken passionately about the need to respect the wishes of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population, including in Crimea. “In the east and in Crimea, people want to speak Russian,” he said in 2014. “Leave them alone, just leave them alone. Give them the right to speak Russian. Language should never divide our country.” His willingness to defy Ukraine’s far-right and respect the country’s Russian culture helped propel his 2019 election to become, in his words, the “president of peace.”

Having long abandoned his peace pledge and bowed to a Ukrainian far-right that threatened his life, Zelensky now adopts their maximalist aims. In its rendering of Ukraine’s strategy, the Post attempts to minimize this by claiming that Ukraine could ultimately “[agree] not to take Crimea by force” in return for Russia agreeing to “accept whatever security guarantees Ukraine can secure from the West.”

But it is the West that has proved to be a major obstacle. When Ukraine and Russia reached a tentative peace deal in April 2022 that allowed for such security guarantees, the US and UK blocked it. As former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill later reported, Russia agreed to withdraw to its pre-invasion position, while Ukraine would pledge not to join NATO “and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.” According to sources close to Zelensky, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson personally delivered the message that Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with” and that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on [security] guarantees with Putin,” his Western patrons “are not.” The deal promptly collapsed.

The US remains just as resistant today. While Zelensky “has pushed hard for the United States and Europe to make firm commitments on Ukraine’s accession to NATO,” the Post notes, “the U.S. and Western European governments remain cold to the idea.” The reason was explained by Zelensky in a candid admission to CNN last year. “I requested them [NATO] personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,” Zelensky said of the period before Russia’s February 2022 invasion. “And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open.” In other words, the prospect of Ukraine’s NATO ascension was deliberately used as a tool to bait Russia.

The prevailing disregard for Ukraine’s security needs and survival can be seen today in the unfolding counteroffensive. The West has pushed Ukraine into an assault despite a rushed training schedule, a lack of air superiority, and facing well-entrenched Russian positions. In a recent interview, Ukraine’s chief military officer, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, openly complained: “Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all.” Zaluzhnyi also dispelled the notion, pushed avidly by US neoconservatives, that last month’s short-lived Wagner rebellion created a military opening for Ukraine. “We didn’t feel that their defense got weaker somewhere or anything,” Zaluzhnyi said.

The US response is to now send more weapons systems that had previously been ruled out, namely indiscriminate cluster munitions and escalation-threatening ATACM long-range missiles. For his part, Zelensky appears desperate to appease his NATO sponsors in advance of next week’s NATO meeting in Lithuania. “Before the NATO summit we have to show results, but every kilometer costs lives,” he recently explained.

And now those “results” will apparently come by attempting to take millions of Crimeans “hostage,” as the one-time “president of peace” continues along the Western-driven path of prolonged war.