Make Crimea Russian again? US mulls recognising Crimea as Russian in bold bid to end Ukraine conflict

According to reports from various American media outlets on Friday, the Trump administration is reportedly ready to recognise the illegally-annexed territory of Crimea as Russian, as a part of its renewed efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine, according to a CNN report citing officials in the know. 

Crimea, southern Ukraine, has been under Russian occupation since it was illegally annexed in 2014. Four other Ukrainian regions—Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south—have also been partially occupied by Russia since its full-scale invasion in 2022. 

These matters had also been discussed in detail during recent high-level meetings in Paris, where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with various other American diplomats, had put forth a draft framework to ease sanctions on Russia, in a bid to effectively freeze the war in its current state, and “move on”. These details were also disclosed to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov during a phone call with Rubio.

“We’re not going to drag this out for weeks or months. We need to decide quickly, within days, whether a deal is achievable in the coming weeks. If it is, we’re committed. If not, we’ll shift our focus to other priorities,” Rubio had said, during the talks in Paris. 

There has been no response from Kyiv to America's latest concession yet, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's recent comments at America's gradual recalcitrance to continuing conflict resolution efforts with their draft framework indicate that he is going to strongly oppose it.

Speaking to reporters in Kyiv on Thursday, he had lashed out at US envoy Witkoff for “adopting Russian strategy”, adding 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 ... we will never consider Ukrainian lands as Russian,” he had declared.

However, the tide of public opinion is changing, as reflected by a poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology at Ukraine in the latter half of 2024. It showed that as many as 31-32% of the respondents (Ukrainian citizens) were ready to accept certain territorial concessions as a means of bringing the long-term conflict—which had aggravated in 2022—to an end. However, as many as 59-60% of them still oppose any kind of concessions, which complicates things. 

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