Russian President Vladimir Putin has no intention of discussing the status of Crimea, a region annexed from Ukraine in 2014, during his upcoming summit with President Trump.
“Crimea cannot and will never be on the agenda because Crimea is an integral part of Russia,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.
That’s a rebuff of Trump’s promise that he would discuss the Ukraine crisis with Putin when the two leaders meet in Helsinki, Finland, for their first formal bilateral meeting. The hardline tone contrasts with Trump’s more generic comments, when he assured reporters that he would have a wide-ranging discussion with his Russian counterpart.
“We’re going to be talking about Ukraine, we’re going to be talking about Syria, we’re going to be talking about elections,” Trump said Friday. “We don’t want anybody tampering with elections. We’ll be talking about world events. We’ll be talking about peace.”
U.S.-Russia relations cratered in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and invaded eastern Ukraine in support of a separatist movement of ethnic Russians. The United States and the European Union imposed sanctions, which intensified after the downing of a civilian passenger jet that summer. Trump’s team and other Western allies have pledged to maintain those sanctions until Russia relinquishes the territory.
“We’re going to have to see,” Trump replied when asked if he might change that policy.
TASS, a state-run media outlet, observed that “the U.S. leader did not rule out that Washington might recognize the [Crimean] peninsula as Russian soil.” But a leading Senate Republican warned against such a move.
“As I travel throughout the Baltics this week in my role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it is clear that Russia’s destabilizing behavior continues to impact the region,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., tweeted. “Recognizing Crimea as part of Russia would undermine the rules-based international order that was created with U.S. leadership and has caused democracy to thrive around the world and made America a safer home for our citizens.”
The annexation of Crimea marked “the first gunpoint land grab in Europe since the end of World War II,” as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen put it.
But one of Trump’s congressional Republican allies wants Trump “to start all over again” with Putin.
“He’s not going to call it a ‘reset,’ because that’s become a cliche, but we’re going to take away these sanctions and build a whole new relationship which facilitates working together to attain mutually-beneficial goals — rather than the current policy, which is unending hostility and belligerence toward Russia, no matter what it does,” Calif. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., who chairs the Foreign Affairs panel’s subcommittee for Europe, told the Washington Examiner in the first days of Trump’s presidency.
