Tensions between Russia and Ukraine were definitively evidenced in February 2022, when the Russian president ordered the territory of his neighboring country to invade, but years ago Moscow had shown symptoms of their ambitions in eastern Ukraine, and also in a peninsula located in the south of the country and that Russia was unilaterally annexed in 2014.
That maneuver was almost the end point to the Russian response to, a citizen revolt in Ukraine that led to the exit of President Viktor Yanukovich, considered by the Kremlin as a coup against a figure related to his positions. In Crimea, however, the prorruse demonstrations that even advocated integration into the Russian Federation abounded.
In this context, Moscow ordered the deployment of troops in the Peninsula – there of thousands of Russian and that historically had housed Russian naval bases – under the pretext of guaranteeing the security of the related to Russia, disregarding not only to the warnings of Ukraine, but also from the United States that, then led by Barack Obama, warned Putin to take a step in fake.
Finally, Putin decided to annex the Peninsula, thus violating a whole series of international conventions and also bilateral agreements signed with Ukraine that guaranteed the security of kyiv, such as the Budapest memorandum, the Russian-Ukrainian friendship and collaboration treaty and the pacts on the Black Sea fleet, which dealt with the Russian maritime presence in the area.
That Kremlin maneuver unleashed a whole current of international against the main Russian officials, a mechanic that years later was repeated with the military invasion of February 2022. The European Union, the United States and NATO punished Russia so it was considered as a betrayal of the good relations of recent years.
Little more than a year and a half after these events, the American tycoon Donald Trump was imposed on the presidential elections of November 2015. During his mandate, Trump came to pronounce against the Russian annexation of Crimea and, in fact, in 2018 his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, published a statement in which he supported kyiv’s positions on this issue.
Pompeo denounced that Putin had overreach and betrayed the main international and bilateral agreements by annexing Crimea, sovereign territory of Ukraine. “The United States rejects the attempt to attach Crimea by Russia and undertakes to maintain this policy until the territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored,” said the one who at that time was head of US diplomacy.
PEACE CONDITION
Clinging to these confrontated positions between Russia and the rest of the West advance the years until Putin orders the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a maneuver that in its first bars led to the Russian troops to the streets of the Ukrainian capital, fearing the fall of kyiv. However, the Ukrainian army, reinforced with constant western aid packages, has managed to contain the Russian initial progress and bring to the war to a phase of stagnation on the fronts.
A few months later, in September of that same year, Putin carried out a maneuver similar to that of Crimea in the regions of territories where he had strengthened his initial progress and in which he used a referendum series to annexal a large part of the east of Ukraine without the recognition of the international community.
This adhesion, however, has not been as effective as it was in Crimea, and the Ukraine army has continued to fight and make it impossible for Moscow to end up settle; While it is true that now, in full conversations for a peace agreement, Moscow demands the recognition of Russian sovereignty in these territories and also in Crimea.
For his part, Trump had erected himself as a conflict that he has always considered that he would not have continued having continued in the White House in the period between 2020 and 2024. The US president, who claimed to be able to resolve the conflict with just a call, now recognizes Putin’s ambitions and has indicated that the recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea.
However, the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, with whom Trump has staged disagreements such as the end of last February in the White House, has been planted before such demands and, referring to the Ukrainian Constitution, he recalled that the Peninsula of the Black Sea is sovereign territory of Ukraine.
Zelenski clings to the Ukrainian claims of recent years, although it is true that the issue of Crimea has been in the background and has become more and more for granted the Russian control of this territory. So much so that Trump also gives it for granted and has accused the Ukrainian president of impossible a peace agreement with his refusal to yield Crimea.
Rewrite the story
“If you want Crimea, why didn’t they fight for her?” Trump wondered in the middle of this week, providing a new version of the recent history of the Peninsula and falsely affirming that Russia managed to annexed it without hardly any Ukrainian opposition, “without a single shot” and with the approval of the then President Obama.
These Trump statements not only provide a new and false version of what happened, but also align with the positions of Russia, a country that ultimately attacked territorial integrity and violated the national sovereignty of his neighboring country, as recognized by the Trump administration itself in its first mandate.
In fact, Zelenski has taken the occasion to openly remind Trump to the aforementioned Pompeo statement in 2018, which has come to share in his official profile in social networks, while he has urged the US president to act “in line with his firm decisions.”
This last Trump helm about Crimea’s sovereignty has come to confirm the affinity that was already suspected with a Putin that despite the isolation to which it has been subjected in recent years by Europe and the United States, seems to have those of winning in the peace conditions whenever the negotiations remain under the umbrella of the current US administration.
