Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday called on Ukraine to accept an American peace proposal that closely aligns with longstanding Russian goals, including a “freeze” of territorial lines in the three-year war, acceptance of the annexation of Crimea by Russia and a prohibition on Ukraine becoming part of the NATO alliance.
It was the first time a U.S. official had publicly laid out a plan to end the war that favors Russia in such stark terms.
This is a macro economic problem for U.S. and the world.
The Trump administration is rewarding Russia by advocating this lopsided U.S. plan. Putin gets what he wants and Ukraine is abandoned by the U.S. Trump promised to get a peace treaty before his election. But in fact Ukraine, NATO and U.S. are the losers and Russia is the winner as a result of U.S. pulling out of the peace agreement. The bedrock goal of Republicans since WW2 has been to contain Russia’s threat to the U.S. and other countries. Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and the Bushes. Now we have a Republican President who supports Russia and Russia’s criminal aggression and war crimes in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other countries.
I am ashamed of the Trump administration and so are my relatives who live in Europe.
Wrong. Russia gave Crimea to Ukraine in the 1991. Russia invaded Crimea and took it by force in 2014.
Since 1948, Crimea’s ownership has shifted from Russian to Ukrainian jurisdiction, and then again to Russian control in 2014. In 1945, following the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars, Crimea was downgraded from an Autonomous Republic to an Oblast (region) within the Russian SFSR. In 1954, it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Crimea became part of the newly independent Ukraine. In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea following a disputed referendum. Today, Crimea is considered by Russia to be part of the Russian Federation, while most countries recognize it as part of Ukraine.
Because of Crimea’s location, Ukraine cannot be viable without either
Solid amicable peace with whoever controls Crimea
(fat chance if that is Russia(!), but conceivable if ruled by Turkey(?!) or an independent Crimea including a mix of the long exiled Crimean Tatars and other ancient populations (Jews), or
Ukraine itself, as is now the legal case under both international law and the Russo-Ukrainian 1991 and 1994 treaties.
Russia had no significant connection with Crimea until Catherine the Great seized it from Turkish control, precisely to take its Black Sea ports. The movement of some Russians into Crimea was begun by Catherine and then later by Stalin, displacing the original population, especially Crimean Tatars.
Ethnically, its original population was an extravagant mixture of descendants of the obscure Tauri peoples, Scythians, and then ancient Greek colonists who long dominated.
Imperial Rome/Constantinople long ruled Crimea, followed, after a period of semi-chaos and semi-independence, by Kievan Rus (the antecedent state to Ukraine) under Vladimir the Great, and then largely conquered by the Mongol Golden Horde, succeeded by the Ottoman Turks.
Sarah Cox Richardson’s latest Letter to an American nicely outlines in detail how Trump’s latest surrender proposal for Ukraine perfectly matches the deal Putin secretly cut with Trump in return for his help in winning the 2016 election.
No, because there was no domestic resistance to the move, in order to stop it we would have had to take 100% of the initiative, with US troops on the ground, going into a country with a power vacuum - with pro- and anti-separatist groups fighting amongst themselves for control of the government. (The then president of Ukraine had just been ousted.)
Further, Russian troops moved in less than a week later, but they were un-uniformed soldiers who took strategic sites (the Parliament building, among others) who were only later identified as Russian soldiers, and by then it was a fait acompli.
That differs entirely from the current situation, where Ukrainians are fighting in unison against a common foe, asking only materiel support and not boots on the ground. They have a functioning government and, at least to the point where they were invaded, a functioning economy.
You see the difference? In Crimea we would have been blundering into the same mess as Bush Jr stumbled into in Iraq; American soldiers, American deaths, American weapons trying to pacify an area already in internal turmoil.
We wisely chose to stay out, even if we didn’t like the outcome. In this case every sane foreign policy expert, even Republicans, have supported the Ukrainian effort to throw out the invaders.
History is a wonderful thing. They have whole books about it, even newspaper articles and podcasts. You should try a couple.
At the same time, Catherine the Great did the deed back before the US had a constitution. Two centuries of ownership/occupation carries a certain gravitas of its own.