General: On Wednesday, US President Donald J. Trump, using the platform Truth Social, attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not agreeing to Russia’s invasion and takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and – according to Trump – irresponsibly impeding peace negotiations with Russia.
The US leader went on to make some of his most detailed comments yet on Crimea, its history, and strategic significance to Ukraine and Russia.
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Trump’s original post is here:
Trump claimed Ukraine lost control of Crimea because US President Barack Obama allowed Russia to have it.
Trump said: “Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion.”
This is false.
In February and March 2014, Russian troops took over military bases and government buildings in Ukraine’s Crimea region.
The Kremlin then held a point-of-gun referendum and subsequently annexed the territory and declared it part of Russia.
The Obama administration, along with effectively the entire international community, condemned the takeover.
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At the time, the US was attempting to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Washington’s hope, shared with major European states, was that diplomatic pressure and sanctions would reverse the Russian invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory.
With very few exceptions – like North Korea and the former authoritarian government of Syria – Russia’s invasion of Crimea and its annexation of the territory is still considered illegal by practically every state on Earth. Arguably, it is only in places like some offices of the Trump White House, and the Kremlin, where Russian control of Crimea is considered legitimate.
The Zelensky government on Wednesday needled Trump and the White House about the US government’s almost-total isolation regarding Russia’s takeover of Crimea by publishing a 2018 declaration by the Trump administration of the time calling Russia’s invasion of Crimea illegal and unacceptable by the United States.
Trump claimed Ukraine never fought against Russian military aggression launched in Crimea.
Trump said: “(I)f he (Zelensky) wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”
This is marginally true in one narrow context, but generally is false. No one handed over Crimea to Russia, the Russian military invaded and took the region over at gunpoint.
When Russian troops took over Crimea, they surrounded Ukrainian military bases, blocked access to Ukrainian warships and broke into government buildings and threw out local elected officials. Russian troops were backed by tanks and artillery, and massively outnumbered Ukrainian forces. Two Ukrainian soldiers and three Ukrainian protesters died and dozens more were injured during that takeover.
Later in 2014, Russia-supported “separatists” using weaponry acquired from Ukrainian military arsenals in Crimea attacked government buildings and officials in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, Odesa, and Kharkiv regions in an attempt to repeat a Crimea-style takeover. Here, Russia-led forces met often-fierce and sometimes effective armed resistance. By summer 2014, a full-scale war was in progress in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. A ceasefire, mostly engineered by France and Germany, came into effect in early 2015, however, battles and exchanges of fire continued along the “ceasefire” line for the next seven years. By the time of Russia’s second, bigger invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, somewhere between 4,500-5,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died and at least three times that been injured fighting Russian troops in Ukraine.
Trump claimed Crimea contains multiple major Russian submarine bases and implied that Crimea is a critical naval security asset that the Kremlin owns and needs.
Trump said: “The area (Crimea) also houses, for many years before ‘the Obama handover,’ major Russian submarine bases.”
This is false. Trump’s comments about Russian submarines and submarine bases in Crimea speak to something the Kremlin wants, not what is actually the case.
Soviet-era submarine pens dug into in Crimea’s rocky south-eastern coast fell out of use with the break-up of the Soviet Union and by the mid-2010s doors and wharves to those pens were rusting and rotting and the sites were only visited by fisherman and tourists.
The Russian Federation has never held full ownership of any military base in Crimea. All facilities on that land have been in Ukrainian territory and ultimately owned by Ukraine, not Russia.
Per the terms of a 2010 Moscow-Kyiv agreement, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (BSF) renewed a lease of military piers inside the Crimean port Sevastopol, where, by the early 2020s, the Kremlin was permanently basing a flotilla of diesel submarines called the 4th Independent Submarine Brigade. The wharf where the submarines tied up was a conventional, on-the-water pier leased by Russia inside a port in Ukraine and run by Ukrainian port authorities.
When Russia invaded Ukraine a second time in February 2022, five submarines were in the Black Sea basin. Two, one in the Baltic and one in the Mediterranean, were unable to return to BSF-rented wharves in Sevastopol because of Turkish invocation of the Montreux Convention banning use of the Straits by a warring nation.
In September 2023, Ukrainian anti-ship missiles attacked Sevastopol port, demolishing the BSF headquarters, killing the fleet second-in-command and several of his staff, sinking a heavy assault warship, and badly damaging and putting out of action one of the five submarines tied up at the base, the Rostov-Na-Danu. Russian BSF fleet leadership shifted all major warships from Crimea to the Russian mainland, out of Ukrainian anti-ship missile range, in October.
Since then, the only submarine known to be present in Sevastopol is the Rostov-Na-Danu’s hulk. Until hostilities between Russia and Ukraine are ended, because of Ukraine’s capacity to hit Russian warships with anti-ship missiles, Crimea is unusable by Russian submarines.
Trump repeated claims that Ukraine is doomed to be defeated by Russia and that Zelensky has no choice but to accept his and Russia’s terms.
Trump said: “The situation for Ukraine is dire – He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the Country…the man with ‘no cards to play.’”
This is false. Ukrainian arms production is up, Ukraine has found strong allies in Europe, and the Ukrainian army’s fighting capacity is increasing. Trump is ignoring not three, but eleven years of increasingly effective Ukrainian military resistance to Russia.
Following the Trump administration’s takeover of power in the US and its overturn of many conventional US foreign policies, among them sustained American support to Ukraine against Russia, the Zelensky administration has moved quickly to fill military capacity and financial gaps left by the departing Americans.
Three months into the Trump regime, Ukraine appears to have managed to replace about half of most arms and financial assistance formerly sent to Ukraine by the US – mostly from European states and the European Union.
In some arms categories, the success has been greater; according to most military analysts, rising European shell production capacity combined with effective sourcing of artillery shells from non-European manufacturers like South Africa and India has largely prevented severe shell shortages, despite the cutoff of American deliveries.
Europe-financed manufacturing of arms and ammunition inside Ukraine accelerated dramatically in 2024. According to Kyiv official statements, Ukraine is self-sufficient in mortar-round and small-arms-ammunition production, and leads the world in artillery systems manufacturing.
Ukraine is heavily dependent on the US for long-range air defense systems capable of intercepting ballistic missiles, but, in three years of war, Russia has been unable to produce or purchase from North Korea more than one or two dozen ballistic missiles a month – a number sufficient to damage Ukrainian homes and businesses but insufficient to affect Ukrainian war-making capacity.
Probably most important for a Ukrainian fighting capacity calculation, Ukraine leads the world in manufacturing and operating tactical drones, a weapons system accounting for 60-70% of all casualties and destroyed equipment in the war.
Ukraine, in 2024, claimed its assemblers built 1.5-2 million strike aircraft in 2024 and, according to government spokesmen, should deliver to troops 4 million attack drones in 2025. Thanks to increasingly dense drone swarms and developed tactics in their use, Ukrainian combat units arguably eliminated Russian capacity to launch major attacks in mid-2023, and since then, Russian assaults have become increasingly bloody.
Following Trump’s election and his government’s rejection of unconditional US commitment to European security, practically all major European states led by Britain, France, Benelux, and Scandinavia have committed to rearmament, supporting Kyiv, and preventing Russian defeat of Ukraine. The country with the world’s third-biggest economy, Germany, has elected into power a coalition strongly supporting Ukraine against Russia, and major rearmament.
Trump’s comment implies Ukraine is alone and cannot resist Russia. The fact is that, as the Trump regime has broken commitments to Europe and Ukraine, European support to Ukraine has increased dramatically. At the same time, by most metrics, Ukrainian fighting capacity is increasing, not shrinking.
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