Columns 
Originally published on The Ukrainian Weekly
The headline in a recent Politico National Security Daily article about U.S. President Donald Trump’s shocking peace plan pointedly asks the question: “Did Putin write this?”
Among the egregious concessions to Moscow found in this peace proposal – perhaps better described as a capitulation proposal – was that Russia gets de-facto control over all the territories it has illegally seized since 2014. But the proposal goes further, adding insult to injury – formal, de jure recognition of Russia’s seizure of Crimea. In effect, this would mean permanently handing over the peninsula to Russia.
This reverses more than a decade of U.S. policy, including that of Mr. Trump’s first administration. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, issued the Crimea Declaration, which condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a threat to “a bedrock international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force.” It also flies in the face of various Congressional legislation. One is the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included a bipartisan amendment barring any recognition of Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia. None other than then-Senator and current U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was one of the chief sponsors of that amendment.
Formal recognition of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea would contradict the longstanding, principled and bipartisan policy of American non-recognition of territorial annexation by force going back to the Stimson Doctrine of 1932 and the Welles declaration of 1940, whereby the U.S. refused to recognize the forcible annexation by the Soviet Union of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
U.S. de-jure recognition of Crimea as Russian would set a dangerous precedent. In addition to violating longstanding U.S. policy, it would also be a gross breach of international law and numerous international agreements. One such agreement is the groundbreaking Helsinki Final Act on European security and cooperation, signed 50 years ago this year, whose 10 core principles include respect for sovereignty of states, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that legal recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea would violate the Ukrainian constitution. I doubt that the Ukrainian people would accept any kind of official, de jure recognition. And it would be a terrible blow to the Crimean Tatars who have endured great suffering for their valiant opposition to Moscow’s rule. Refat Chubarov, the leader of their representative body, the Mejlis, asserted in reaction to Mr. Trump’s peace proposal: “Crimea is the homeland of the indigenous Crimean Tatar people and an integral part of Ukraine. Accordingly, no one can decide the fate of Crimea under any circumstances, except for the Ukrainian state and the Crimean people.”
Mr. Trump, not surprisingly, has continued to repeat his long-held ahistorical view that Crimea is Russia, most recently asserting that “Crimea will stay with Russia.” And witless Steve Witkoff has not helped by shockingly parroting many Putin talking points following some of his meetings with the Russian war criminal. This included Mr. Witkoff’s appalling acceptance of the patently false narrative that Ukrainians in the occupied oblasts in 2022 and 2023 voted to join Russia in what the international community widely and accurately condemned as sham referendums.
As painful as it is to write this, the current cold, hard realities of the war are such that Ukraine, to achieve a ceasefire, will likely need to accept temporary, de-facto (never de-jure!) Russian occupation. But any decision on the status of Crimea or the four fully or partially occupied Russian-controlled oblasts is solely up to the Ukrainian people and their democratically elected leaders to determine. It is not up to anyone else, including Messrs. Trump and Witkoff. Indeed, Ukraine’s more measured and eminently rational approach toward territorial questions is that they should be discussed and resolved only after a full and unconditional ceasefire.
For real estate moguls Messrs. Trump and Witkoff, the occupied lands seem to be merely pieces of real estate to be traded at whim. They appear to care not one whit that there are millions of real human beings living on this “real estate” amid a climate of fear, repression and the absence of freedom. But all of us who support Ukraine should care. We must not forget the inhabitants of those lands, including those who have been forced to flee.
We are not talking about just a few people. Prior to Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, some 11.4 million people lived in Crimea and the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts now under total or partial Russian control. With the caveat that it is difficult to determine numbers due to limits in access to reliable information, estimates now are that there are, at most, 5 million people living in these occupied regions.
Crimea’s population alone declined from around 2.3 million people before the annexation to about 1.9 million a decade later. The decline would have been much steeper if it were not for the estimated 800,000 Russians who have moved from Russia to Crimea since 2014.
As of April, it is estimated that 3-3.5 million people live under Russian occupation in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts. This is down from some 6.4 million people who lived there in January 2022, a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion. This represents a steep decline of more than 50 percent of the original population, especially factoring in that Russians brought in since February 2022 to colonize and Russify these Ukrainian lands have made up for some of these losses.
The bottom line is that millions of Ukrainians who once made their homes in these territories have now fled the devastation of war and Russian rule. Tens of thousands more have been forcibly deported to Russia.
In my next column, part II, I will examine how Putin’s barbaric war of choice has adversely affected the lives and freedom of millions of Ukrainians still living under the Russian boot.
Orest Deychakiwsky may be reached at orestdeychak@gmail.com