Accepting Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea would upend a core tenet of U.S. foreign policy.
Max Boot
The Washington Post
April 24, 2025
In its well intentioned but rushed and ham-handed attempts to end the war in Ukraine, the Trump administration is flirting with disaster. Apparently, President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, has crafted a peace plan after traveling to Moscow for three lengthy meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin — but never once going to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The one-sided plan is now being presented to the Ukrainians on a “take it or leave it” basis, with Trump on Wednesday writing online that Zelensky “can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country.”
The Telegraph and Axios have run the most complete accounts of the seven-point U.S. proposal, which has not been publicly released. According to their reporting, the United States would extend de jure (i.e., legal) recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea and de facto (i.e., in practice) recognition to the Russian occupation of parts of four other Ukrainian regions. This would be accompanied by other gifts to Putin, including a promise that Ukraine never become part of NATO (though it could join the European Union) and that U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2014 occupation of Crimea be lifted, ushering in a new period of U.S.-Russian economic cooperation.
What does Ukraine get in return beyond an end to the fighting, at least for the time being? Not much, aside from the return of a small sliver of the Kharkiv region occupied by Russia. Although the draft plan speaks of “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine, there is no apparent U.S. security commitment. It would be up to Europe to safeguard Ukraine, even though European leaders have said that any peacekeeping forces they send would need U.S. support. The agreement seems to envisage a U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal — and, bizarrely, U.S. control of the giant Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — as a stand-in for an actual U.S. security guarantee. There is not even any U.S. commitment to continue supplying badly needed munitions to Ukraine.
This will raise well-justified fears in Kyiv that Russia would use the resulting ceasefire to rearm its forces, employing the windfall generated by a sanctions-free economy, to restart aggression against Ukraine in a few years’ time. That, after all, is precisely what Putin did after the Minsk peace agreements in 2014 and 2015.
There are a few bits of good news in the U.S. plan: It does not include Kremlin demands for Ukrainian disarmament, a change of regime in Kyiv, or complete Russian control of all four
regions in southern and eastern Ukraine that Putin claims to have annexed but doesn’t fully occupy. (The Financial Times reports that Putin told Witkoff he might back off his previous demand for the entirety of the four regions, but it’s unclear if the Russian dictator will accept the U.S. plan.) So it’s not as bad as it could have been, but it’s pretty alarming nevertheless.
The draft plan’s proponents will argue that it simply recognizes reality — namely, that Russia occupies about 19 percent of Ukraine’s territory (an area the size of Virginia) and is unlikely to be dislodged in the near future. But the plan undermines one of the core pillars of the post-1945 world order, which has also been a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy for nearly a century.
In 1932, following Japan’s invasion of the Chinese region of Manchuria and the imposition of a puppet regime there, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson issued a diplomatic note making clear that Washington would never recognize Japan’s aggression, even if there was scant prospect of rolling it back. This became known as the Stimson Doctrine, and it was reaffirmed in 1940 by Sumner Welles, the undersecretary of state, after the Soviet Union illegally occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The United States never recognized the Soviet annexation before the Baltic republics were freed in 1991.
This same principle — outlawing wars of conquest — underpins the 1945 United Nations Charter, which states that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
The United States and its allies went to war with Iraq in 1991 to uphold this fundamental principle after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and it was championed regarding Crimea by Trump’s first-term secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. “As we did in the Welles Declaration in 1940,” Pompeo wrote in 2018, “the United States reaffirms as policy its refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over territory seized by force in contravention of international law.”
Ukraine supports the Stimson Doctrine. On Tuesday, Zelensky said: “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea. There is nothing to talk about. It is against our constitution.” But the United States appears to be wavering. On Wednesday, Trump took to Truth Social to blast Zelensky, claiming that his statement was “inflammatory” and “very harmful to the Peace Negotiations.”
Note that the Ukrainian president was not ruling out the possibility of temporarily accepting the Russian occupation of Crimea as an unpleasant but inescapable reality. (Last year, Zelensky admitted: “We do not have enough forces to return Crimea. We must seek diplomatic means.”) Zelensky’s red line is against legal recognition of the Russian occupation. That should be America’s red line, too.
Trump blurred the issue on Truth Social, writing that “nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory.” Though that might technically be true, it will be scant comfort to Ukrainians if the United States — their most powerful ally — ratifies the occupation of Crimea as part of a peace deal that it expects Kyiv to uphold.
If Trump tries to bludgeon Ukraine into accepting this one-sided plan, he will be rewarding aggression and making the world a more dangerous place. America’s European allies are alarmed by the possibility that Putin could interpret this concession as an invitation to further aggression against Georgia, Moldova and the Baltic states. And imagine how it would be seen in Beijing: Xi Jinping might calculate that, if China were to attack Taiwan, the United States would accept the new facts on the ground.
That is an exceedingly perilous signal to send: It increases the risk of a major war in Asia and endangers a pro-Western democracy that produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. The United States should stand by its historical commitments: Don’t abandon Ukraine, and don’t abandon the Stimson Doctrine.