Moscow has reacted strongly to a Polish suggestion to position Crimea beneath UN administration for 20 years. No Russian territory is up for dialogue, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has mentioned, in response to the proposal.
“Russian territory and Russian areas can’t be the topic of any discussions or switch to anybody,” Peskov informed reporters on Friday, describing the thought as “absurd.”
The traditionally Russian peninsula was reassigned to Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev and was claimed by Kiev after its declaration of independence in 1991.
Polish Overseas Minister Radoslaw Sikorski on Thursday floated the notion of constructing Crimea a UN mandate territory, describing it as “symbolically necessary for Russia” and “strategically necessary for Ukraine.” Based on Sikorski, the UN mission may put together the territory for a referendum in as much as 20 years, as soon as it determines who can be legally eligible residents.
The Ukrainian Overseas Ministry additionally publicly rejected the proposal, insisting that Ukraine’s territorial integrity “can’t be a topic of debate or compromise.”
Residents of Crimea and town of Sevastopol voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia in March 2014, shortly after the Maidan coup overthrew the Ukrainian authorities in favor of militant nationalists.
Kiev has continued to assert Crimea, in addition to the Donetsk and Lugansk Folks’s Republics and the areas of Kherson and Zaporozhye, which joined Russia in September 2023. Moscow has repeatedly mentioned that none of those territories are up for negotiation.
“Crimeans returned to Russia a decade in the past and don’t have any want for Western meddlers resembling Sikorski,” Russian lawmaker Leonid Ivlev informed reporters on Friday. The retired Air Power major-general proposed to place western Poland beneath a UN mandate as an alternative.
“Crimea is traditionally and rightfully Russian territory, we stay on our personal land,” Ivlev mentioned. “The Poles can’t say the identical. Sikorski ought to keep in mind that Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and the free metropolis of Danzig have been transferred to Poland by Stalin. Perhaps we must always put these former German lands beneath a UN mandate after which maintain a referendum there,” he instructed.
Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Poland obtained former German territories as much as the Oder-Neisse line as compensation for ceding to the USSR the lands it had seized within the Twenties. These territories turned a part of the present-day Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.