US President Donald Trump shakes hand with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the end of the press conference after their meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland.

Donald Trump has said the occupied peninsula of Crimea could be legally recognised as part of Russia in the ongoing peace talks to end the Ukraine war.

“Crimea will stay with Russia,” the US president told TIMEmagazine in an interview which was conducted on April 22.

Even though Crimea has been officially part of Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Trump claimed that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “understands that” too.

“Everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time. It’s been with them long before Trump came along,” he said.

Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 when Barack Obama was in office, and a year before Trump declared his intention to run for the US presidency.

At the time, Trump described Putin’s invasion of Crimea as “so smart”, telling

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