Russia refuses to discuss terms for giving up Crimea
Russia has said the future of Crimea is not up for negotiation after Kyiv said it would be prepared to enter talks on the illegally annexed territory.
Sergei Tsekov, the Russian senator for occupied Crimea, was responding after Andriy Sybiha, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, said that Ukraine would negotiate around Crimea if its spring counteroffensive was successful.
“We don’t even want to talk about it,” Mr Tsekov said. “No one will discuss ‘diplomatic’ methods of transferring Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. Crimea will never return to Ukraine.”
Mr Sybiha told the Financial Times that Ukraine would negotiate for the first time since calling off talks a year ago if its forces advanced to the border with Crimea, roughly 100 miles south of the current frontline along the Dnipro River.
But even Mr Sybiha’s Ukrainian colleagues have played down the prospect of negotiations over Crimea, which Mr Zelensky has always said he intends to recapture.
Andrey Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, said Mr Sybiha’s remarks did not represent a shift in Ukraine’s position but were intended to reassure Western allies that Ukraine would not close the door on diplomacy and to encourage the continued supply of weapons.
“It is a way of saying ‘guys, we are reasonable’,” he said.
The focus on Crimea and the start of Ukraine’s spring offensive came as officials from both sides reported a large build-up of Ukrainian soldiers around the front line near Melitopol, a Russia-occupied town in southern Ukraine that defends the main railway and road links into Kherson and Crimea.
Some Ukrainian and Western commentators have argued that capturing the peninsula is not only possible but essential to force Russia to end the war.
But many Western officials doubt the military viability of assaulting Crimea and fear that attempting to do so might prompt Vladimir Putin to escalate the conflict, possibly with nuclear weapons.
Anthony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said when asked about Crimea last month that “there’s going to be territory in Ukraine that the Ukrainians are determined to fight for on the ground; there may be territory that they decide that they’ll have to try to get back in other ways”.
Ukrainian artillery attacks on Russian positions around Melitopol have also intensified, which military analysts have said may precede an offensive.
A Russian official said that air defence systems had shot down six shells fired by a Ukrainian Himar long-range artillery gun on Thursday. Civilians are also being urged to leave the region.
Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the high point of Mr Putin’s presidency.
Mr Zelensky has said that he wants to recapture all of occupied Ukraine, including Crimea.
Ukrainian officials said on Thursday that they intended to recapture Crimea with force or diplomacy.
