Even before it began earlier today, the Crimea Platform was branded by many the most important international event in Ukraine’s history, BBC Ukraine reported.

This meeting is considered in Kyiv to be one of the pivots on which the policy of bringing back Crimea and Sevastopol will be based. Volodymyr Zelensky has decided to make Crimea a priority after his first and only meeting with Vladimir Putin in December 2019. In preparation for the Paris summit, the Ukrainian president stated that he would discuss during negotiations with Putin the status of the peninsula that was annexed in 2014.

But the attempt to discuss the issue with the Kremlin at the time failed. In an absolutely predictable way, Moscow repeated over and over again that the issue of where Crimea belonged did not exist and that it had no intention of talking with anyone about it.

For Zelensky, the position taken by his Russian counterpart made him decide making Crimea a state policy priority, on the grounds that Donbas is discussed in both the Minsk and Normandy formats, while Crimea is not discussed by anyone anywhere.

BBC’s Svyatoslav Khomenko recalls that during the presidency of Pyotr Poroshenko, the Kiev authorities had made some attempts to set up a discussion platform for the situation on the annexed peninsula. In 2016, Poroshenko announced the launch of the “Geneva plus” format. But this initiative was perceived unequivocally even among Ukrainian observers and the project was eventually abandoned.

Meanwhile, Kremlin-affiliated outlets have noted that US President Joe Biden is not attending today’s summit and not all the nations participating have sent their highest-ranking officials, an observation meant to suggest that, for the West, Ukraine and the subject of Crimea are not priorities.

In a briefing ahead of the event Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that 44 states and international bodies had announced their participation, including 14 heads of state and government, as well as the President of the European Council and the Vice President of the European Commission. Kyiv will continue to connect other states to the Crimea Platform and hopes that their number will increase. Any decisions to be adopted at the Summit, said Kuleba, “will have the same power for every state regardless of who heads the delegation”.