Ukraine never recognizes the temporarily occupied Crimea as russian. Crimea had autonomy before the war and is an autonomous republic.
This was stated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with Italian TV channel Rai1.
"Crimea with its rights, its parliament, has always had its own separate parliament. But it was Ukrainian territory. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea is part of Ukraine. We said we were ready to talk to the russian Federation that, okay, the decision on Crimea is not on time. "Because there is a war going on. It's human life. Let's put this issue off our talks. If it hurts, if it complicates the negotiation process," he said.
Zelenskyy added that they are ready to temporarily postpone the Crimean issue from the negotiation process if it complicates the meeting between him and Putin.
"Okay, let's postpone this issue. I think we had a good proposal. Even our delegation in Turkey, when meeting with the russians, offered to postpone, but not forever, and postpone with such conditions, let's even sign that our states should settle the Crimean issue for 10 years. It was good from the point of view of diplomacy and removing this issue from the whole map of the war for a while," the President emphasized.
But russia did not agree, although it initially called it a "good format."
Regarding the so-called broad autonomy of Donbas, Zelenskyy added that Ukraine will never agree to this.
The Crimean issue is raised in talks between Ukrainian and russian delegations. According to the participant of the negotiating group Mykhailo Podolyak, Crimea is a separate clause of the agreement, in which the Ukrainian side proposes to hold bilateral talks on the status of Crimea and Sevastopol for 15 years.
In other words, it is proposed to fix that Ukraine and russia will not use military or armed forces to resolve the Crimean issue for 15 years while negotiations continue but will continue their political and diplomatic efforts to resolve the issue.