US President Donald Trump has declared that Ukraine will neither regain Crimea nor join NATO, signaling a hardening of Washington’s position following his recent summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
In an interview with Fox & Friends, Trump revealed that Kiev had approached the US-led alliance at the outset of the conflict seeking both NATO membership and support for reclaiming Crimea. “They went in and said ‘We want to get Crimea back’,” Trump explained. “The other thing they said was ‘We want to be a member of NATO’. Well, both of those things are impossible.”
The Crimean peninsula, home to a predominantly Russian-speaking population, voted to join the Russian Federation in 2014 after the Western-backed coup in Kiev. Moscow has since argued that Ukraine’s push for NATO membership and its treatment of Russian-speaking citizens were among the key triggers of the current conflict.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, however, has consistently rejected any concessions on territorial sovereignty. “The Constitution of Ukraine does not allow the surrender of territories or the trading of land,” Zelensky previously stated, while acknowledging that so-called “land swaps” had surfaced during White House discussions.
Moscow insists that any sustainable peace agreement must address its core demands: Ukraine’s neutrality, renunciation of NATO ambitions, demilitarization, and recognition of the territorial status of Crimea along with Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, all of which voted to join Russia in 2022.
The Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage marked the leaders’ first in-person meeting since 2019 and was described as “productive” by both sides. Putin characterized the talks as “frank” and “substantive,” while Trump noted that although the road ahead is difficult, discussions had “moved in the right direction.”
Adding a new dimension to bilateral relations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed that Trump received a formal invitation to visit Moscow.
“He has an invitation,” Lavrov said in an interview with Rossiya 24, recalling that Trump had expressed interest during the Alaska summit. While Trump admitted he could “get a little heat” domestically for such a trip, he did not rule it out.
The statements on NATO and Crimea underscore the complexity of ongoing negotiations, as Washington, Moscow, and Kiev continue to clash over Ukraine’s future status in the global order.
