White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said Monday that the two superpowers have “agreed to disagree” on the issue of Crimea’s 2014 independence referendum and subsequent request to join the Russian Federation. She didn’t rule out the impossibility of changing the status quo, though.
“We do not recognize Russia’s attempt to annex Crimea,” Sanders said during a briefing with reporters Monday. “We agree to disagree with Russia on that front and our Crimea sanctions against Russia will remain in place until Russia returns the peninsula to Ukraine,” she added.
The White House press secretary’s comments come ahead of the summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled to take place July 16 in Helsinki, Finland.
As Sputnik’s Ivan Danilov noted earlier, the upcoming summit sparked fears about the two leaders finding a common tongue, with some speculating that Trump might recognize Crimea’s 2014 referendum of independence and subsequent request to join Russian territory. According to the Hill, Sanders apparently aimed to quell these fears during the briefing.
However, the White House website notes that this disagreement is not set in stone.
One day before Sanders’ briefing, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton dropped an equally vague comment, saying, literally, “well, we’ll see.”
Bolton underscored, however, that the acceptability of changing borders with military force is “not the position of the United States.”
Earlier on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov ruled out the possibility of negotiations on Crimea.
The status of the peninsula “cannot and will never be on the agenda because it is an inseparable part of Russia,” he said.
Source: Sputnik
