President Trump’s emissaries shuttled from Moscow to Kyiv seeking a way to end the Ukraine war. Afterward, Trump negotiator Jared Kushner explained, “…the hardest issue is still territory.” That dispute centers on Crimea and Donbas.
These areas have been points of territorial intransigence for Ukraine and Russia.
However, there is a way to break that deadlock. But it might not be what either side expects. That’s because the territorial claims of both Russia and Ukraine rest on competing narratives rather than basic facts. Each side seems stuck on its own version. The underling truth is an orphan.
Russia seems to have based its related claims on kinship and historical background. Ukraine’s position presumes that the territorial authority of the pre-2014 Ukrainian constitutional order continued uninterrupted after the revolution.
But that presumption overlooks what happened to Ukraine’s constitutional democracy in 2014. The country’s established order began to unravel in Kyiv. That was before Crimea and Donbas became the hot issues they are today. The precipitant was the Ukrainian Revolution.
The revolutionaries did not simply take over Ukraine’s structure of governance. They threw it out. They disposed of the democratic constitutional order.
The Western media told a different story. The New York Times called it a decisive “victory …read more
Source:: Ron Paul Institute