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