In an interview with German television, he said that “already in the days of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was an independent state with UN membership” and Crimea belonged to the Ukrainian SSR.
The agency recalls that the Ukrainian SSR within the framework of the USSR was, together with several states, as well as the Byelorussian SSR, a founding member of the UN, which signed the charter of the Organization in 1945. However, after the collapse of the USSR, Russia became de facto the USSR’s only legal successor on the UN Security Council.
Earlier, the head of the Crimean parliament Vladimir Konstantinov said that the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 was not legally formalized and Crimea never left “the composition of the Russian Federation, whose borders did not change in 1954, and for so in 2014.”
A working group of the Crimean State Council, which studied the legal grounds for the transfer of the peninsula to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, concluded that such grounds did not exist. The working group is preparing two applications to the Constitutional Court on the legitimacy of the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR.
