The Trump administration is weighing recognising Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea as part of a potential Ukraine peace deal, according to a report by news website Semafor.
Semafor, citing two people familiar with the matter, said U.S. officials had also discussed the possibility of having Washington urge the United Nations to do the same.
Reuters could not independently confirm the report. Semafor said the White House had declined comment.
Semafor said Trump had not formally made any decisions on Ukraine’s territory, and that the possible Crimea moves were among various options being floated.
Trump-Putin Talks
Trump was due to speak with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to try to convince the Russian president to accept a ceasefire in his country’s war with Ukraine and move towards a more permanent end to the three-year-old conflict.
Crimea is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine by most countries, and Kyiv has said it wants the Black Sea peninsula back even though it has recognised that returning it by force is unrealistic for now.
The Kremlin has repeatedly said that Crimea, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based and whose pre-annexation population was mostly Russian speakers, is already formally part of Russia, a question it says has been closed “forever.”
30-Day Ceasefire
Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
There was no immediate response from the Kremlin to a request for comment from Reuters.
The Kremlin said last week that Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who held talks in Moscow, expressing “cautious optimism” that a deal could be reached to end the three-year conflict.
Challenges Remain
In separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the United States, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, emphasised that there were still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Asked on ABC whether the U.S. would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied, “Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?” He added that the negotiations had to be grounded in “reality.”
Rubio told CBS a final peace deal would “involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Russia and Ukraine,” and that it would be difficult to even begin those negotiations “as long as they’re shooting at each other.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that he saw a good chance to end the Russian war after Kyiv accepted the U.S. proposal for a 30-day interim ceasefire.
However, Zelenskyy has consistently said that the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized. Russia seized the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and now controls most of four eastern Ukrainian regions since it invaded the country in 2022.
(With inputs from Reuters)
