US President Donald Trump said Crimea “will stay with Russia,” once again reiterating his narrative that Ukraine has lost the peninsula and blaming his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for Moscow’s annexation.
The statement, made in an interview with TIME magazine published on Friday, is a reiteration of Trump’s similar remark on Wednesday on his Truth Social platform, where he questioned Ukraine’s sovereignty over Crimea and blamed Obama and Ukrainians for not winning it back in 2014 when Russia annexed the peninsula.
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“Well, Crimea went to the Russians. It was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama, and not by me. With that being said, will they be able to get it back? They’ve had their Russians,” Trump said when asked by TIME if Moscow should, or could, keep occupied Crimea.
Trump also parroted Moscow’s narrative that Russia has a claim over the peninsula due to its proclaimed Russian influence.
“They’ve had their submarines there for long before any period that we’re talking about, for many years. The people speak largely Russian in Crimea. But this was given by Obama. This wasn’t given by Trump. Would it have been taken from me like it was taken from Obama? No, it wouldn’t have happened. Crimea, if I were president, it would not have been taken,” Trump added.
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Crimea was given to Ukraine by Russia in 1954 when both were part of the USSR, where it was formally recognized as an autonomous republic under Ukraine after the USSR collapsed. Kyiv has allowed Russia to retain a naval presence in Crimea until Moscow’s 2014 illegal annexation.
The local Tatar inhabitants have vowed not to recognize Crimea as Russian.
When asked by TIME magazine about Russia’s intention to keep the regions it claimed to have annexed, Trump said Moscow will keep the peninsula and asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept it without discussing the fate of other regions.
“If Crimea will stay with Russia – we have to only talk about Crimea because that’s the one that always gets mentioned. Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelensky understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time,” Trump said.
Trump’s statement came amidst reports that, as part of Washington’s peace proposal, the US might recognize Crimea as Russian in exchange for Moscow to drop its maximalist demand to capture the entirety of four other Ukrainian regions that it has laid claim to but does not fully control.
The last Trump administration had pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty over Crimea.
While US Vice President JD Vance said on Wednesday that both Kyiv and Moscow “are both going to have to give up some of the territory they currently own,” Trump later suggested that not “taking the whole country” is already a “pretty big concession” for Moscow.
At present, Russia controls almost the entirety of Ukraine’s Luhansk region and the majority of the Donetsk region. The majority of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions remain under Ukrainian control three years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
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