President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine should recognize Russia’s control over Crimea, the southern Ukrainian peninsula Moscow siezed by force more than a decade ago, is threatening to upend international law and order.

A new U.S. peace plan offered to Russia and Ukraine proposes American recognition of the peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014.

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.

Trump has been accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of prolonging the war by resisting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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.