U.S. President Donald Trump says “Crimea will stay with Russia." It's a definitive statement about the need for Ukraine to cede territory to end the war.

In 1944, Stalin deported almost all Crimean Tatars to Central Asia in what Ukraine recognises as an act of genocide. They were only allowed to return home in the late 1980s. As we've been reporting, Crimea has been a point of contention in peace talks for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, when both were part of the USSR, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the unification of Moscow and Kyiv. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the peninsula became part of newly independent Ukraine.