Crimea was taken by the Kremlin in 2014 following an invasion and subsequent referendum held under occupation, and the international community has resisted recognizing the peninsula as Russian to avoid legitimizing the illegal annexation.

Doing so risks undermining international laws and treaties prohibiting the taking of land through use of force. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly said he will not cede territory to Moscow.

But the move would be a boon for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long sought international recognition of Russian sovereignty in Crimea. Putin so far has refused to agree to Trump’s proposal for a broad peace deal.

The people said a final decision on the matter hadn’t yet been taken. The White House and State Department did not respond to a request for comment. A US official familiar with the negotiations, asked about the possibility of recognizing Crimea, declined to comment on the details of the talks.

The US presented allies with proposals to enable a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in Paris on Thursday, including an outline of terms to end the fighting and ease sanctions on Moscow in the event of a lasting ceasefire, Bloomberg reported earlier.

The proposal would by and large freeze the frontline, with most other Ukrainian territory now occupied by Russia effectively remaining under Moscow’s control, said the people. Kyiv’s aspirations of joining NATO would also be off the table. The people declined to provide further specifics, citing the confidential nature of the discussions.

The Paris talks included a meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and US envoy Steve Witkoff, as well as discussions among Rubio and national security advisers and negotiators from France, Germany, the UK and Ukraine.

The allies will gather again in London next week to follow up on their discussions.

Still, Trump signaled impatience Friday at the White House, saying that while he was hopeful both sides would agree to move forward on a ceasefire, the US was willing to walk away if he sensed either side lacked dedication to the process.

“If for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, you’re foolish,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “You’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re going to just take a pass. But hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

Trump’s proposal will need to be further socialized across Europe and with Ukraine, which could balk at the concessions Trump has outlined. The US president has also previously said other Ukrainian ambitions — like joining the NATO alliance — would not be possible.

One of the officials said the US plans, which need to be further discussed with Kyiv, wouldn’t amount to a definitive settlement, and that European allies wouldn’t recognize any occupied territories as Russian. The officials stressed that talks would be moot if the Kremlin didn’t agree to stop the fighting, and that providing Ukraine with security guarantees to ensure that a deal holds up were also an essential part of any agreement.

On Friday, Rubio said that security guarantees aren’t an “illegitimate desire” on Ukraine’s part, but that negotiators so far haven’t drilled down to that level of specificity.

“Every sovereign nation on Earth has a right to defend itself,” he said.

Kyiv has already agreed to a ceasefire and its position is that Moscow needs to agree to one as well before discussing other matters, a person familiar with the matter said. In Paris, the Ukrainian delegation’s task was to discuss how any ceasefire would be monitored, as well as a peacekeeping contingent, the person said.

Russia has continued to bomb Ukrainian cities after balking at a proposed partial truce covering the Black Sea. The Kremlin said a separate, 30-day partial truce covering energy infrastructure ended on Friday. A week ago, Russian forces fired ballistic missiles, including one equipped with cluster munitions, at Ukraine’s northeastern city of Sumy, killing 35 people.

The Paris talks also built on France-UK efforts to form a postwar “reassurance force” in Ukraine, as well as plans to ensure that Kyiv has an adequately resourced and manned military as part of a package of security guarantees.

Officials in Paris and London are hoping that that proposal would demonstrate that Europe is serious about committing its own resources to Ukraine’s postwar future, and persuade Trump to provide a backstop to those guarantees.

Lifting sanctions while Russia continues to occupy large areas of Ukraine could prove problematic for several of Kyiv’s allies. Removing European Union restrictions, including unfreezing immobilized assets, requires the backing of all member states.

Witkoff, who has met Putin three times, told Fox News this week that the key to an overall agreement revolves around “five territories,” without providing more details. Russia insists that its military seizure of parts of Ukraine since 2014, including the Crimean peninsula and large areas of four regions — Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk — must be recognized in any accord.

Speaking to reporters in Kyiv on Thursday, Zelenskiy lashed out at Witkoff for “adopting Russian strategy,” and said that Trump’s envoy had no “mandate to discuss Ukrainian territories, because these territories belong to our people.”

“We do not discuss territories until the ceasefire,” the Ukrainian president said. “We will never consider Ukrainian lands as Russian.”

At the same time Russia says the transfer away from Ukraine was done fairly by the residents themselves in a referendum. Russia contends the residents voted to attach Crimea to Russia, and that Russia intends to keep it.

The issue is considered an important factor in negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine war.

But actually both arguments are bogus. Neither side seems to understand what actually happened regarding Crimea.

The answer can be found back in 2014. That’s when a revolution took place in Ukraine. It changed the nature of Ukrainian sovereignty in a way that neither side seems to have recognized.

A significant result is that post-revolution Ukraine has never exercised sovereignty over Crimea. It never occupied it and never governed it. That leaves present-day Ukraine with no legitimate claim to the territory.

Most of the rest of pre-revolution Ukraine had acceded to the control-by-force imposed by the unelected revolutionaries. It was they who also ended the democracy that Ukraine had enjoyed before the revolution. They chased the democratically-elected president out of the country. They replaced the democratically promulgated constitution with one of their own choosing. And they ruled by force.

You wouldn’t have known that from news reports of the era. They made the takeover sound like the opening of new vistas for freedom and democracy in Ukraine. But if examined honestly, all of that can be seen as outright propaganda. It is really quite astonishing how observers on both sides of this issue lined up with the propaganda narrative.

There never was any substantial invasion of Crimea by Russia as was reported. It is true that 15,000 Russian troops were there. But they were there before the revolution. Their presence was provided for in a treaty signed by Ukraine. It covered the operation of the large Russian naval facility that was there since Soviet times.

The inhabitants of Crimea are largely ethnic Russians. The self-appointed revolutionary leaders had shown an early indication of anti-Russian bigotry. I suspect it generated fear among the Crimean people. That in turn might have biased their decision to stay out of post-revolution Ukraine. If so, that fear was prophetic. It turns out that post-revolution Ukraine has carried out a program of cultural and linguistic cleansing of things Russian.

A careful study of the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States even suggests that pre- and post-revolution Ukraine are not even the same country in terms of statehood and sovereignty. I covered that in greater detail in my article titled, “Peace Plans, Schmese Plans: Key Path to Ukraine Peace Long Ignored by All.” (It can be found online by googling the title.)

Altogether, the above analysis suggests that it would be outright foolishness for the matter of Crimea to be on the bargaining table for a peace settlement. It is a bogus issue. The matter is already settled. Both sides just need to acknowledge the truth of the matter.

The story was broken on Friday by RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who said she’d received it from Russian security officials. The journalist initially released a Russian-language transcript of the conversation and then posted the source audio file in German on social media. 

The 38-minute audio dated February 19 contained a conversation between four officers of the German air force (Luftwaffe), including its commander, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz. The military were discussing the operational and targeting details of Taurus long-range missiles that Germany was considering sending to Kiev. 

The officers were discussing the matter as if the delivery had already been agreed upon, and also spoke about maintaining plausible deniability in the event of the bridge attack that would allow Berlin to avoid being dragged into the conflict between Kiev and Moscow.

“According to our assessment, a conversation in the Air Force was intercepted,” the ministry’s spokeswoman told ARD, adding that the German officials were unable to determine whether any changes were made to the transcript or the recording itself.

Earlier, the German media also reported that the audio clip appeared to be authentic. Germany’s DPA news agency said that the officers were talking using the  Webex online calling, messaging and conference platform. Der Spiegel reported that “according to an initial assessment, AI-supported counterfeiting is largely ruled out.”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the leak a “very serious matter” earlier on Saturday. “That is why it is now being investigated very intensively, very carefully and very swiftly,” he told journalists in Rome following an audience with the Pope, adding that such a probe was “necessary.”

He did not comment on the contents of the recording and did not elaborate on whether Berlin was aware of the plans discussed by the senior military officers.

Some German politicians assumed that the incident might have further implications. A German MP, Roderich Kiesewetter of the Christian Democratic Union party, himself a retired colonel and the head of the German reservists’ association, told the German media that other sensitive military conversations could have been intercepted and might be published by Russia in the future. 

“It is in no way surprising that such a conversation was intercepted,” he told Germany’s n-tv news media outlet, adding that it was “equally unsurprising that the recording became public.” “We have to assume that the Russians have more material of this kind,” the retired colonel said.

The incident drew strong criticism from other German politicians. “There must finally be an end to our naivety,” the head of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, told n-tv. She also called for enhanced “counter-espionage” efforts while admitting that Germany was “obviously vulnerable in this area.”

The chairman of the Parliamentary Control Committee, Konstantin von Notz, demanded an “immediate clarification of all background information” in a conversation with the German media company RND.

Biden’s scenario is not implausible, but it is not the most probable. It appears dubious that Russia’s President Putin will be able to “take” all of Ukraine and then purposely attack NATO members, although Moscow has intensified its attacks on Ukraine.

What is much more likely than a direct Russian attack on NATO members is that the “new Crimean war” will first expand to regions outside of NATO’s Article V defensive mandate, even if Moscow itself is not necessarily directly responsible for the widening of all of these conflicts but concurrently seeks to use them for its geopolitical advantage.

The widening of the NATO-Russia war over Ukraine since February 2022 is already taking place, given the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas over Gaza since October 2023. These two conflicts have begun to destabilize much of the “wider Middle East”―as the their strategic-economic impact continues to overlap and interlink.

New fronts could accordingly be generated as the global system risks polarizing into two rival alliances. The US and NATO (that includes Turkey) and the EU (that does not include Turkey) have increasingly been linking in military, political and/or economic terms with third states, including the AUKUS alliance of the US, UK, and Australia, plus the Abraham accords of the US, Israel and the UAE, among other states.

These US-led alliance systems are intended to “constrain” the opposing China-Russia Eurasian “axis,” which includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) that now include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as Iran. Not all the BRICS states are in full strategic agreement, so Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Brazil, South Africa, and India, among others, cannot really decide which side they will take… until pressed to do so… Likewise NATO-member Turkey and Indonesia represent pivot states that could shift sides as well.

The Israeli-Hamas war over Gaza has already begun to expand into the West Bank as Israeli colonists seek to force Palestinians out of Palestinian-controlled territories since October 2023. Tensions between Lebanon, Hezb’allah and Israel have continued to mount as Hezb’allah and Israel’s IDF counter-attack each other in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. Israel’s desire to assassinate all Hamas leaders believed to be responsible for the October attacks, as illustrated by the assassination of a Hamas leader in Lebanon, could likewise expand the conflict into new regions. While both sides claim that they do not want to widen the conflict, neither side wants to appear “weak” and be seen as backing down either.

U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias who have attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria raise the prospects of direct conflict with Iran. Concurrently, missile and drone attacks by Houthis in South Yemen (with Iranian backing) threaten to strangle some 12% of the world’s trade, which includes 8 percent of global grain trade, 12 percent of seaborne-traded oil, and 8 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade. Repeated Houthi attacks could result in direct US and Allied offensive intervention against Houthi positions in Yemen. Such Allied threats to attack the Houthis would only add to Yemen’s misery as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, along with Sudan and now Gaza—if engaged diplomacy cannot resolve the conflict.

Without a diplomatic settlement, the insecurity-security dialectic could soon escalate despite (or because of) the deployment of US aircraft carriers and warships in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. The Pentagon has additionally hoped that Operation Prosperity Guardian will engage at least 20 countries in the effort to defend the Red Sea against Houthi attacks. Yet the Operation has not yet gained the support of the major Arab-Persian Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, as well as China. This lack of Arab support is in part due to the fact that the Operation Prosperity Guardian is seen as supporting Israel―even if Egypt will suffer the consequences from the reduction of trade through the Suez.

A blockage of the Red Sea route through the Bab El Mandeb chokepoint to the Suez Canal has already raised the global costs of shipping by augmenting the length of travel and costs of insurance. Loss of Egyptian income from the Suez Canal—at the same time that Israel, in a form of hybrid war, has been pressing Cairo to deal with Israel’s displacement of Palestinian refugees from Gaza in a new Nakba—could work to undermine Egyptian President Sisi’s already shaky repressive controls over Egypt with its strong Muslim Brotherhood movement.

On the one hand, Israel’s destruction of Gaza, its indiscriminate killing of civilians, and its brutal acts of collective punishment for the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians will lead more Palestinian men and women and supporters to join “terrorist” organizations. On the other hand, the brutal collective punishment of Palestinians will provoke an anti-Israeli backlash throughout much of the Arab and Islamic world, forcing leaderships that had started to open relations with Israel, to freeze or abandon ties. Such tensions will concurrently spark a regional arms race that could result in nuclear weapons proliferation—and not Iran alone—as Saudi Arabia and Turkey have both threatened the nuclear option.

In the background of the conflict are Israeli fears of Iran’s development of nuclear weaponry. There is danger that Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has sought to “eliminate” both Iran and the Iranian-backed “axis of resistance”―particularly if Teheran appears to commit itself to further enriching uranium to the point of developing nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities. To attack Iran directly, Tel Aviv needs US backing. Yet this does not prevent Tel Aviv (and the US) of supporting Kurdish and Baluchi independence movements inside Iran, as accused by Teheran. Ironically, the purported “Islamic State” terrorist attacks on Shi’a Iran appear to be serving US and Israeli efforts to further destabilize the country.

Thus far, Israel has not been unable to draw the US into the fray, although continual Iranian-backed attacks on US forces in the region could do the trick, as could Iranian efforts to counter US forces in the Arab-Persian Gulf through the deployment of anti-ship missiles and mines, plus the probable acquisition of advanced Russian SU-35s fighter jets which could threaten US defense capabilities.

In general, the wars in the Black Sea and Red Sea will significantly augment the general condition of stag-inflation by means of rising transport, food, energy and resources prices, combined with additional taxes, preparations for war, military drafts, and other factors that are directly or indirectly related to the “new Crimean War”. The latter globalizing factors could further augment socio-political tensions that spark civil wars in certain countries that could then lead to new international military interventions—much as has already proved the case for Somalia, Ethiopia, and the other countries near the Horn of Africa.

Interstate conflict, and the rise of piracy and anti-state terrorist groups, such as al-Shabab’, among others, on the Horn of Africa has resulted in a scramble by China, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, as well as Japan, Russia and India to establish naval bases in Djibouti and/or the region―in addition to the bases of the US, France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain already established in Djibouti. In addition to the dangers posed by piracy and anti-state “terrorism,” both India and the US have been concerned with the burgeoning influence of China’s blue water navy in the Bay of Bengal, the Straits of Malacca, as well as the South China and East China seas.

Strong Russian ties to North Korea represent a double gambit. On the one hand, Russian purchase of North Korea’s conventional weaponry has permitted Russia to intensify its missile strikes against Ukraine. On the other hand, by strengthening its ties to North Korea, Moscow is able press China into closer defense ties. This is true given the fact that North Korea’s conventional and nuclear weapons programs threaten both Japan and South Korea and force the latter two US allies to boost their defense capabilities. By the nature of the insecurity-security dialectic, this increase in defense spending, in turn, raises additional tensions with China―and presses Beijing to look back to Moscow for energy and defense supports to defend itself against US alliances.

The US-Japanese-South Korean alliances, coupled with the AUKUS Pact of the US, the UK, and Australia, plus stronger perceived US support for Taiwan independence, all press China into closer defense ties with Moscow. These US-led alliances, seen as “encirclement” by Beijing, raise the question as to whether China and the US can eventually reach a grand compromise—or else explode into a larger regional war—at the same time that the civil war in Myanmar has intensified. At the start of the western 2024 New Year, Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose totalitarian executive powers have been admired by former President Donald Trump, once again proclaimed that China’s unification is inevitable—in his (failed) effort to scare the Taiwanese population just before Taiwan’s presidential and parliamentary elections held on January 13, 2024.

The refugee, drug, and weapons crisis along the U.S.-Mexican border has been leading Trumpists in the US to advocate military intervention with drones and special forces in Mexico against drug cartels—with or without the permission of Mexican authorities. Here, Washington has not been able to crack down on conventional arms sold to Mexican drug cartels that are being used against Mexican police and military, while also not being able to stop illegal immigration or Fentanyl imports. This has made the domestic political situation in the US even more divisive, making a consistent foreign and defense policy more difficult to achieve.

If the US should use force inside Mexico against drug cartels in the future, much as Washington did before it entered World War I, it could further destabilise the country, potentially dragging the US into yet another quagmire, this time on its own front door. And the crisis along the US-Mexican border now corresponds with Venezuela’s threats to seize oil-rich territory in Guyana. These Venezuela’s threats encourage the US to strengthen its military strength in the general region. And if diplomacy fails, the range of conflicts in the region could open up yet another front.

Having said that Moscow would not purposely attack NATO members at the present time does not prevent the scenario that an accidental firing of a Russian missile or drone into NATO member territory or other actions, such as a terrorist or cyber sabotage operation by a third party that causes an “intolerable” amount of destruction, however defined, could provoke NATO to declare its Article V defence clause against Russia or other states—as could the assassination of a major world leader, much as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had helped to provoke World War I—among other possibilities.

In this regard, conflicts among non-NATO states could potentially draw in NATO countries. Tensions between Russian-controlled Transnistria and Moldova could spark conflict, for example, as Moldova looks to NATO and the EU for greater political, economic, and defence backing. Russian-controlled Transnistria could represent a threat to Ukraine, while Kyiv could also assist Moldova in clearing out pro-Russian forces. Concurrently, Moscow’s inability to protect its CSTO ally Armenia versus Azerbaijan (backed by NATO-member Turkey) over the Azeri takeover of Nagorno Karabakh raises more tensions, as the EU has begun to consider more strongly backing Armenia, thus further upsetting EU relations with Azerbaijan, Turkey, in addition to Russia. Moreover, Moscow has been backing pan-Serb threats to intervene militarily to protect Serb populations in Kosovo, a situation that could spark a new NATO-Serbia conflict, if negotiations fail.

Disputes between NATO and Russia are further growing as NATO expands its membership to Sweden and Finland and continues to promise potential membership for Ukraine as opposed to agreeing to Ukrainian neutrality backed by US and European military capabilities. As the nuclear test ban comes to an end, Moscow has been testing and deploying its SARMAT ICBM (or Satan II in NATO terms). Moscow appears to be considering the deployment of tactical nuclear capabilities in its northern fleet. Disputes over the Suwalki gap, plus the fear that Russian submarines could threaten global internet communications cables in the North Atlantic and in international waters, represent a potential casus belli.

Control over the GIUK (Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom) Gap—the area in the northern Atlantic Ocean that forms a naval choke point—represents a region that could accordingly spark a NATO-Russia war. It is this gap that separates the Norwegian Sea and the North Sea from the open Atlantic Ocean. Norway’s intelligence service has warned that the escalation of a localized war into a wider conflict involving the United States, NATO, and Norway should not be ruled out.

In conclusion, as to be argued in my forthcoming book, The New Crimean War: Reducing Risks and Perils, it is more likely that the dangerous conflicts already taking place in the Black Sea and Ukraine and around Israel will first expand to regions outside of NATO’s Article V mandate before these conflicts begin to draw NATO members, plus other Allies, and Russia (and possibly China) into direct confrontation.

The more the “new Crimean war” continues, the more it can spin out of control and widen—in accord with the insecurity-security dialectic. It is now time to engage in both secret and open diplomacy with all actors involved, including Russia and Iran, to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine and in Gaza—while concurrently seeking diplomatic compromise between China and Taiwan, among other disputes—in the concerted effort to negotiate a sustainable regional and global peace.

Hall Gardner is a Professor and Chair, ICP Department, American University of Paris. Hall Gardner is the author of “World War Trump: The Risks of America’s New Nationalism” and a collection of poems, “The Wake-Up Blast.”

Here is a brief survey covering one thousand years of the rich history of this region that generated my interest in Feodosia: The earliest known inhabitants of the area now called Theodosia – as far back as the 8th century B.C. – were the Tauric people. The Tauri – famous in the ancient world for their virgin goddess- had a custom of sacrificing shipwrecked strangers to the goddess known to the Greeks as Iphigeneia. This became the basis for the play by Euripides entitled “Iphigeneia and Orestes among the Taurians”. The city was officially founded as Theodosia by Greek colonists from Miletos in the 6th century BC. Interestingly, Western Philosophy was founded at almost the same time by Thales of Miletos –the “Father of Western Philosophy”. Presumably – since ideas and beliefs were often traded along with goods – the early Feodosians were aware of this new phenomenon although there is no documented evidence.

Having rich agricultural land and strategically located on the Western shore of Anatolia it was bound to attract interest from ambitious neighbors. And it did in the first century A.D. with the Roman invasion of Crimea. This was followed by the sacking of Feodosia by the Huns in the 4th century A.D. After that came the Kipchaks known to the Russians as “the Polovtsy” The Polovtsy practiced agriculture and also controlled trade between ancient Rus and the Black Sea. Controlling much of Crimea, the Polovtsy engaged in the sale of slaves and furs to Byzantium and the Islamic East. These people, for the most part, practiced the shamanist Täri religion as did their ancestors from Eastern Mongolia. In addition to the Polovtsy there is evidence of Khazar settlements in this region. In fact, excavations in Feodosia have revealed Khazar artifacts dating back to the 9th century. All of that precedes 1,500 years of the following history: War with the Golden Horde. Feodosia’s role in the outbreak of the Black Plague spreading throughout Europe. Conquest by Genoa. Conquest by the Turks. Conquest by Imperial Russia. And finally… the invasion by and occupation of Nazi forces in WW II. Unfortunately, the wall of sanctions that has been put in place prevents valuable research being done by Americans on this fascinating Crimean town. It is both shameful and scandalous that politics should be allowed to halt the advancement of the sciences. As an American academic and citizen, I would like to urge Joe Biden to dismantle the sanctions list. “Please Mr. President…tear down this wall!”

“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.

My own research in Ukraine last month suggests that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would have very great domestic difficulty in supporting a cease-fire leaving Crimea in Russian hands. Not only would this face strong opposition from hard-line nationalists and the Ukrainian military, but the Ukrainian government has helped foster a general public mood that Crimea must be recovered at all costs.

In a departure from the previous government line, Andriy Sybiha, the deputy head of the presidential staff and a veteran Ukrainian diplomat, told the Financial Times last week: “If we succeed in achieving our strategic goals on the battlefield, and when we are on the administrative border of Crimea, we are ready to open a diplomatic page to discuss this issue … [though] this doesn’t mean that we exclude the way of liberation [of Crimea] by our army.”

In a recent interview rebroadcast by Radio Liberty, another advisor to Zelensky, former journalist and hard-line nationalist politician Mykhailo Podolyak, took a very different line from Sybiha, ruling out any compromise with Russia:

“Could there be talks about a diplomatic way out of Crimea? … Yes, of course, if [Moscow] starts withdrawing those troops today, then we can wait a day, two or three, while those troops leave together with the [Russian] inhabitants.”

Podolyak said that after Russia leaves all Ukrainian territory, negotiations should be about Russian compensation to Ukraine and punishment for war crimes, together with the creation of a 100-kilometer (62-mile) demilitarized zone on the Russian side of the border. He also raised another issue of crucial importance to the issue of Ukraine’s recovery of the territories controlled by Russia since 2014: that of the fate of their populations, much of which have historically identified with Russia. Referring to pro-Russian Crimeans as mankurts (roughly, “brain-dead slaves”), he said:

“We have to completely close everything related to the Russian cultural space there. We have to eradicate everything Russian. There should be only Ukrainian cultural space or global cultural space. We should not have a dialogue about whether a person has the right to use the Russian language or not. … There shouldn’t be this line: ‘Maybe these are our people, maybe we need to talk about something with them.’ I was constantly surprised by this concept of reintegration in 2014-2015 and [the argument that] let’s reintegrate the occupied territories with a smile. Gangsters live there, criminals live there, occupying armies and administrations live there, but let’s reintegrate them with a smile. … They should be expelled, and some should be imprisoned.”

This vision (which many in the world would likely see as tantamount to ethnic cleansing) was not shared by most of the Ukrainians with whom I spoke during three weeks in the country last month. A clear majority said Crimea should be returned to Ukraine—but with some (usually unspecified) measures for the peaceful reintegration of its population.

A substantial minority, however, said Ukraine should be prepared to give up Crimea in return for peace and the return of the territory taken by Russia since last February. The reasons they gave differed, but the three principal ones were that “otherwise this war will go on forever”; that Crimea (which was transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet republics in 1954 by Soviet decree) “was never really part of Ukraine”; and that the pro-Russian population of Crimea would be a perpetual internal problem for Ukraine. According to an opinion survey conducted last July, 58 percent of the Ukrainians who responded said Crimea must return to Ukraine—a majority but not a huge one.

There was one striking difference between the two positions on Crimea and a negotiated peace with Russia. The people with whom I spoke who stated that the return of Crimea to Ukraine was essential and nonnegotiable mostly spoke on the record. Not one of the advocates of compromise was willing to do so.

As a former dissident from the Soviet days (and leading supporter of the 2004 Orange Revolution) told me:

“Certainly, a great many people do believe that we have to fight on indefinitely to reconquer Crimea, irrespective of losses; but at heart, most sensible people know that it is not possible. The problem is that it has become almost impossible to say this in public without losing your job and perhaps worse. You know that under the Soviet Union people were afraid to say what they thought. Well, I have to say that a similar situation exists in Ukraine today. This is due to the anger and hatred in the population caused by the Russian invasion but also to repression by the state. Anyone who advocates compromise with Russia is immediately publicly branded a traitor and targeted by the SBU [the Ukrainian security service], no matter if they have always supported Ukrainian freedom and independence.”

As in most recent wars, this public atmosphere is greatly reinforced by state control of television, which since the suppression of allegedly pro-Russian channels has become almost absolute as far as news and analysis are concerned. Voices on television now speak overwhelmingly in support of the government line (or perhaps, the previous government line) that the return of Crimea and the eastern Donbas is nonnegotiable. This is backed up by pressure on the print media. As a journalist in the city of Dnipro told me, “The biggest problem is the atmosphere of censorship. Nobody gives a direct order, but everyone knows that if you write certain things, you will have bad problems, from your employers and the security services. So discussion now takes place only within very narrow limits.”

As Ukrainian analyst Volodymyr Ishchenko has stated, the result is a “spiral of silence” in which views held by many in private are wholly absent in public.

Whether the planned Ukrainian offensive succeeds and brings Ukrainian forces to the border of Crimea or fails and leads to an ongoing stalemate, Ukraine is likely to face increasing calls from Western governments for some form of provisional territorial compromise with Russia, coupled with the threat of a reduction of Western aid—and Sybiha’s statement suggests that some Ukrainian officials at least understand this very well.

But as in so many wars, state propaganda aimed at motivating the population to fight has helped create what one Ukrainian analyst called a “Frankenstein’s monster” for itself when it comes to compromise with Russia, a public mood that it helped create but now cannot control. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, has stated: “If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proposes peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow, he will commit political suicide”—which is no doubt why Zelensky himself has not yet said anything about Sybiha’s remarks. All the Ukrainian analysts with whom I spoke agreed that only intense public pressure from Washington could allow Zelensky to agree to a territorial compromise—even if Zelensky himself felt compelled to respond to the pressure in public with bitter protest.

By Anatol Lieven, the director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

In Crimea, we were based in Yalta, a small city on the Black Sea. From Yalta we did trips to the capitol Simferopol, the naval port at Sebastopol, the “valley of death” and many other destinations.

Crimea is beautiful and the people were very friendly and happy to see us. At that time, they had been under Western sanctions for two years because of their decision to secede from Ukraine in March 2014. Tourist ships that previously visited their ports no longer stopped because of sanctions. Students who graduated from Crimean universities no longer had their academic achievements recognized in the Europe. Visa and Mastercard could not be used. The sanctions caused a myriad of problems.

We met with many groups including the elected city council of the capital Simferopol, college students, high school students, Armenian and Tatar ethnic groups, a Rotary business group and more. They all said the decision to secede from Ukraine was overwhelmingly popular. The official referendum results confirmed what they said: with 83% of the voting public participating, 97% of voters said they wanted to “re-unify” with the Russian Federation.

When we asked why they preferred to be part of Russia, there were various explanations. Everyone referred to the Feb 2014 coup which overthrew President Yanukovich. Over 75% of the Crimean population voted for Yanukovich in the 2010 election which was deemed to free and fair by European monitors. They did not like the violent coup which ousted their elected president.

Another reason was because the coup government immediately repealed legislation that the Russian language could be used in schools and institutions. The majority of the population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea have Russian as their native language. The hostility of the coup government was unmistakable.

A third reason was because of the violence and thuggery of the forces which drove the coup. Over a few days almost 100 people were killed on the Maidan plaza. There is overwhelming evidence the killing was done by snipers shooting from rooms and the roofs of opposition controlled buildings. The fact that BOTH protesters and police were killed indicates purposeful intent to exacerbate and ignite the crisis which is exactly what happened.

A fourth reason for the Crimean decision was because of an incident on the night of Feb 20. Hundreds of Crimeans had gone to Kyiv to peacefully demonstrate in favor of the government and against the increasingly violent mob. When the killing peaked on Feb 20, they realized it was too dangerous and peaceful protests were hopeless. They headed home in an 8 bus convoy. One hundred miles south of Kyiv the bus convoy was stopped by ultra-nationalist thugs. All the passengers were terrorized, many were beaten and seven killed. News of this violence rapidly spread and shocked the people of Crimea. The referendum was quickly organized and held without violence on March 16. Turnout was huge and the results decisive. Two days later, Russia welcomed Crimea into the Russian Federation.

When we visited, just two years after the coup, we learned there were no regrets about the decision to leave Ukraine despite the problems caused by western sanctions. People told us that Crimea had been neglected under Ukraine. Now, as part of the Russian Federation, all sorts of infrastructure improvements were being made. We saw this first hand at the new Simferopol airport. We heard about the coming Kerch Straight bridge, which was completed a few years later. We saw the remodeling and rebuilding of the famous Artek youth summer camp.

It was very interesting to meet with young Tatars. This is an Muslim indigenous ethnic group in Crimea. When asked if western NGOs were active in promoting opposition, they smiled and said “Yes ….Soros.” Looking it up later, I learned that the US billionaire gave grants of $230 million to influence Ukraine.

On our trip we also learned about Crimea’s long history as part of Russia. The Crimea peninsula and naval port at Sebastopol has been Russian ever since 1783. It has been the Russian Navy’s only southern freshwater port for 240 years.

In 1954 Crimea was designated to the Ukrainian republic by Soviet Premier Krushchev. There was no consultation but it was not critical because they were all part of a centralized Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up, 94% of Crimean voters wanted to leave Ukraine and re-establish the Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic. Those wishes were ignored by Kyiv.

The 2014 coup was the last straw. The Maidan violence, coup government decisions on language, and attacks on civilians made it imperative to quickly secede. Russia already had soldiers in Crimea at the leased naval base at Sebastapol. The referendum proceeded quickly and peacefully.

Western hypocrisy and double standards are breathtaking. The West actively promoted the breakup of Yugoslavia, the secession of Kosovo from Serbia and South Sudan from Sudan. The right and popular will of Crimeans to secede from Ukraine and reunify with Russia is clear. Yet the West continues to falsely claim that Russia “occupies” Crimea.

In November 2021 the US signed a “Charter on Strategic Partnership” with Ukraine. It declares, “The United States does not and will never recognize Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea.” Evidently it does not matter what the Crimeans think and want. What kind of “democracy” is this?

Any attempt by a Ukrainian government to “take back” Crimea would be met with firm opposition and resistance from the people who live there. The chance of this happening is near zero.

The misinformation about Crimea shows how distorted media coverage of the entire Ukraine conflict is.

Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at rsterling1@protonmail.com.

In the eyes of all the participants in the war, Crimea is freighted with crucial strategic significance.

For the Ukrainian government, the recapture of Crimea and the naval base of Sevastopol would not only mark Ukraine’s total defeat of Russian aggression, but would also eliminate Russia’s ability to blockade Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, and make any future Russian invasion of Ukraine much more difficult.

The latter belief seems on the face of it flawed, since Russia would retain 1,200 miles of border with Ukraine to the east and north. However, it is tied up with the belief that the Russian loss of Crimea would mark victory over Russia in this war, and would be a humiliation so crushing that the Putin regime would fall — and that from this would follow the drastic weakening or even complete disintegration of the Russian Federation.

This is also the hope of the Polish and Baltic governments and of hardliners in Western Europe and the United States. They hope for the elimination of Russia as a significant factor in global affairs, leading to the isolation of China and the strengthening of US global primacy. Hence the increasing language (cynically borrowed from the Left) of the “decolonization” of Russia, a transparent code for the destruction of the existing Russian state.

US strategists also have a more specific reason to hope that Russia can be driven from Crimea. Sevastopol is the only Russian deepwater port on the Black Sea. The others would take immense effort, time, and expense to be turned into viable naval bases. The loss of Sevastopol would therefore virtually eliminate Russia as a significant power not only in the Black Sea but in the adjacent Mediterranean as well.

Then again, perhaps these US strategists should be careful what they wish for. A glance both at the map and at the policies of the Erdoğan government in Turkey should make clear both that Turkey, not the United States, would probably be the greatest beneficiary of this, and that a steep rise in Turkish power would by no means necessarily be to the benefit of the West.

It should also be noted that many Russian goals in the Middle East and Mediterranean have not in fact been contrary to the interests of the United States. If the Bush administration had listened to Russia (and France and Germany) and not invaded Iraq, it would have spared the United States losses of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, and the people of the Middle East infinitely greater losses and sufferings.

If the Obama administration had listened to Russia and not overthrown the Gaddafi state in Libya, it would have avoided more than a decade of civil war in Libya, the spread of civil war and Islamist extremism across much of western and central Africa, and a great increase in illegal migration to Europe. If the Obama administration had destroyed the Ba’ath state in Syria, it would almost certainly have found itself mired in another catastrophe along the lines of Iraq, but without Iraq’s Shia majority to provide some sort of basis for state reconstruction. These actual or potential disasters were all the work of forces in Washington — not Moscow.

As to the Biden administration, it seems divided on the subject of how far to defeat Russia. On Crimea, a line leaked to the New York Times and other outlets has said that the administration wants to strengthen Ukraine sufficiently to be able to credibly threaten Crimea (presumably by recapturing the “land bridge” between Crimea and Russia proper, through the Russian-occupied territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia), but like the Pentagon, does not believe that Ukraine could in fact recapture it and thereby risk nuclear war.

The Biden administration appears to believe that if the Ukrainian army could break through to the Sea of Azov, this would frighten Moscow so much that it would agree to a deal (which Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky indeed offered back in March) whereby Russia would return to the lines it held between 2014 and last February, and the issues of the formal status of Crimea and the Donbas would be deferred for future negotiation.

This strategy is however extremely risky, because it requires a strong degree both of military fine-tuning and of control over Ukrainian actions — and neither is guaranteed. Moreover, without a full recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, it would be very difficult for Russia to withdraw completely from the “land bridge” to the peninsula that it seized last year, because that would put Ukraine in a far stronger position to start a new war to capture Crimea at some stage in future. For the loss of the land bridge to Crimea would leave only the bridge across the Kerch Strait as a means for Russia to supply Ukraine by land — and Ukraine has already demonstrated its ability to destroy that bridge.

Furthermore, one of the reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year was that Ukraine had been blocking the canal from the Dnieper River to Crimea, thereby gravely damaging Crimean agriculture. As long as a renewed war remains a possibility, if Russia wishes to hold Crimea, it must fight to hold or retake the land bridge.

An understanding of the importance of Crimea to Russians can be drawn largely from the goals of Western hardliners, mentioned above. The Russian establishment, and most ordinary Russians, are determined to maintain Russia’s position as a great power. Three other factors are however also present. The first is Crimea’s emotional significance, stemming from memories of the heroic defense of Sevastopol against the French, British, and Turks in 1854–55, and the Germans and Romanians in 1941–42. The Red Army lost more men in Crimea than the US army lost on all fronts of World War II put together.

The second is that between Crimea’s 1783 conquest by Catherine the Great from the Ottoman Empire and its Crimean Tatar allies, and its 1954 transfer to Ukraine by Soviet decree, Crimea was part of Russia. Until the latter date, at no point in Crimea’s history had it been part of Ukraine. Russians say — not without reason — that if the situation were reversed, and Crimea had been transferred from Ukraine to Russia, then much of Western public opinion would have sympathized with Ukrainian demands for its return.

The third is that Ukraine has an ethnic Russian majority. In January 1991, an overwhelming majority (94 percent) of Crimeans voted to become a separate “Union Republic” of the USSR, which would have led to Crimea becoming an independent state alongside Ukraine and Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved. In December of that year, a slim majority (54 percent) of Crimeans voted for an independent Ukraine, but on condition of Crimea’s autonomy, which the Ukrainian government unilaterally abolished four years later. Throughout the period of Ukrainian rule, a majority of Crimeans repeatedly expressed the desire for autonomy within Ukraine.

After the Russian seizure in 2014, an (internationally unrecognized) referendum and a series of opinion polls indicated that annexation to Russia had solid majority support. How things stand today is difficult to say given the level of repression now prevailing in Russia. But as former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych has pointed out, the intense anti-Russian cultural measures introduced by the Ukrainian government — including the banning of the Russian language and the burning of Russian books — are unlikely to have increased support for Ukraine in Crimea.

It is impossible to say for sure if Russia would in the last resort use nuclear weapons to hold Crimea. It seems likely that they would begin by a less dangerous unconventional attack — for example the disabling of US satellites — that could begin escalation toward nuclear war. There are no grounds at all, however, for reasonable doubt that the Russian state would be willing to run colossal risks, for itself and for humanity. This being so, we should remember the words of President John F. Kennedy in his “Peace Speech” to American University in June 1963, reflecting the lessons that he had learned during the Cuban Missile Crisis:

Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.

“The Ukrainians make the decisions about their operations and when they conduct them. Crimea is a part of Ukraine.

“We’ve made that very clear from the beginning. If they decide to conduct an operation within Crimea, they’re well in their bounds. That is a sovereign part of their country that was illegally invaded by Russia in 2014,” said Singh.

“They have every right to take that back,” she added.