Ukraine’s president pledges to ‘return’ Russia-annexed Crimea

Volodymyr Zelenskyy urges the international forum to back Kyiv in its bid to overturn the 2014 seizure of Black Sea peninsula.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pledged to do all he can to recover the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula and urged international allies to support the effort. Speaking on Monday at the Crimean Platform, a summit in Kyiv designed to keep international attention focused on Russia’s 2014 annexation, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would use “all possible political, legal and first and foremost diplomatic means” to pursue its goal. Russia’s seizure of Crimea was denounced as illegal by most of the world and has sent Moscow’s relations with the West plummeting to post-Cold War lows in the years since.