After Trump’s emissaries shuttled from Moscow to Kyiv, negotiator Jared Kushner summed up the state of play: “…the hardest issue is still territory.” The dispute centers on Crimea and Donbas.
A commentary from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity proposes a way out. Its argument is that the claims of both Russia and Ukraine rest on competing narratives, not on basic facts, and that seeing this would take both regions off the negotiating table. The piece is opinion, and what follows is the institute’s case, not settled fact.
The institute’s argument
The commentary says Russia built its claims on kinship and history. Ukraine, in its telling, assumes that the authority of the pre-2014 constitutional order carried on without a break after the revolution.
The institute disputes that assumption. It argues that the revolutionaries did not merely take over the machinery of government but threw out the democratic constitutional order itself, and with it the basis of authority for every official and office that drew legitimacy from it. What remained, it says, was the power of force. At that moment the revolutionaries’ reach did not extend to Crimea or parts of Donbas.
Borders figure heavily in the case. Ukraine fixed its borders in 1991, when its Law on the Succession of Ukraine set them at those of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and that definition was written into the constitution in force on the eve of the 2014 revolution. The commentary says that once the constitution was discarded, borders were defined by physical control instead. In its words, where revolutionary authority could impose itself, the land was Ukrainian, and where it was resisted, there was “no defensible territorial claim.”
On that reading, calling Crimea and parts of Donbas “breakaway regions,” as CNN and Reuters have, presupposes continuous legitimate rule that was never there. The commentary also notes that Western outlets welcomed the 2014 change: it quotes The New York Times calling it a “victory for democracy” and The Economist writing that “the world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy.”
Counterarguments it takes on
The institute anticipates two objections. The first is the international-law doctrine of state continuity, under which a state keeps its identity through changes of government. The commentary says that idea may help settle debts, but it produces absurd results on borders. The second is wide international recognition of the post-revolution authorities. Recognition, the institute answers, does not create the internal authority it recognizes.
It also stresses what it is not claiming: not that Ukraine ceased to be a state, but that its revolutionary authorities lost their constitutional basis and relied on force.
Petro Poroshenko took office in June 2014 after a democratic election, the commentary says, but inherited only what was left of the country. It adds that, judging by his rhetoric, neither he nor his successor Volodymyr Zelensky recognized the territorial losses.
The institute’s conclusion is that if both sides accepted these facts, negotiators could stop debating narratives and work toward a practical peace treaty. Whether that happens, it writes, depends on whether US negotiators will drop the prevailing narratives and “impose that reality on President Zelensky.”
