Dan Sabbagh writes:

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” Donald Trump told Time magazine in a largely sympathetic profile on Friday. And with that statement, the US president made clear that he wanted to carve up another country, Ukraine, and so legitimise the forcible seizure of land made by Moscow 11 years ago.

From reading the transcript of the interview, Trump’s thinking is hardly coherent. Crimea, he says, wouldn’t have been seized if he had been president in 2014, but “it was handed to them by Barack Hussein Obama” and now Crimea has “been with them [Russia] for a long time” – so it is time to accept the seizure.

The president does not even pursue the argument that a recognition of Russia’s occupation of Crimea is a necessary price of ending Russian military assault on Ukraine, though perhaps he thinks it – and instead the conversation is moved on by the reporters to discussing Trump’s aspirations for annexing Greenland and Canada. “The only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state,” he added.

Wars seldom end satisfactorily. The struggle, violence and sacrifice often does not bear the promised fruit. Invaded suddenly by Russia, Ukraine fought off the capture of Kyiv and existential collapse in the spring, summer and autumn of 2022 but has been unable to expel the attackers since, leaving Kyiv facing the reality of Russia occupying about 18% of its territory.

But the proposed US settlement term sheet – now in the public domain and verified by Trump’s comments about Crimea – is redolent of great power thinking at the end of previous wars: the carve-ups of Versailles in 1919, where a country that had only been narrowly defeated was treated as if it were conquered, or Potsdam in 1945, which divided Europe into west and east. [Continue reading…]