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

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has long made it clear this is a red line for him.

“There is nothing to talk about. It is against our constitution,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump scolded Zelensky for that remark, accusing him of making it “so difficult to settle this war” and saying Crimea was “lost years ago.” It is a topic Trump revisited in an interview with Time magazine, saying as part of his proposal to end the war “Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelensky understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”

This spat between the two presidents has put the region firmly back on the agenda. Here’s what we know.

Is this legal?

No. If the Trump administration was to somehow recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, it would be breaching international law as well as multiple declarations and agreements made by the United States, including by the first Trump White House.

“In terms of international law, such a pronouncement would be null and void,” said Sergey Vasiliev, an international law expert and professor at the Open University in the Netherlands.

Recognizing Crimea as part of Russia would put the Trump administration in breach of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the US made a commitment to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders, in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.

In 2018, during the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement reaffirming the US’ refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over Crimea.

Carla Ferstman, a law professor at Essex University and director of its Human Rights Centre, said that recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea by the US “could in principle provide some weight” to Moscow’s claim that the peninsula’s status was decided in a 2014 referendum that was condemned by Western powers as a sham.

“Far more likely, however, is that such a declaration creates a further rift between Europe and the US, and within NATO,” she said.

Recognizing Crimea as Russian would also be illegal under Ukraine’s constitution – which is one of the reasons why Zelensky said it was out of the question.

But Vasiliev said that even if Ukraine changed its constitution and signed some sort of agreement handing sovereignty of Crimea to Moscow, this could be considered invalid if Kyiv was coerced into it.

What would it mean in practice?

Since any recognition of Crimea as part of Russia would be in breach of international laws and norms, it is unlikely that other countries would follow in the US’ footsteps.

“Given the fluidity of US positions under the Trump administration, it is not clear that it would have any practical impact,” Ferstman said.

“If this manifested into a clear and permanent position of the US, then it would make it more difficult for the US to engage in collective efforts in support of Ukraine and would make the gulf between the US and other NATO partners more entrenched,” she added.

Why is Crimea so important to Ukraine?

Crimea has been part of independent Ukraine since the country split from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Roughly 2.5 million people lived in Crimea before its illegal annexation in 2014 and many more would regularly visit the tourist hotspot, known for its beaches and nature reserves.

Many other Ukrainians have emotional links to the peninsula.

How did Russia annex Crimea?

The crisis in Crimea started shortly after the 2014 mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s Russian-backed regime of Viktor Yanukovych.

As the nation grappled with the chaos caused by the Maidan protests, Russian soldiers dressed as civilians or in uniform without identifying insignia – at the time referred to as “little green men” – started popping up outside government buildings and military bases across Crimea.

Russia has had a major naval base in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol for over 200 years. A dispute over that facility and the Black Sea fleet stationed there erupted between Kyiv and Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. The argument was later settled in a deal that saw Ukraine leasing the base to Russia in exchange for stable gas prices.

While Moscow denied any involvement in the appearance of the little green men in Crimea, it held a sham referendum on joining Russia just weeks after the covert operation. Putin would later acknowledge he had deployed Russian troops there.

Did Ukraine fight for Crimea?

In his latest tirade against Zelensky, Trump asked “why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”

The truth is more complicated than Trump suggests.

The Russian operation took Ukraine – and much of the world – by surprise. Russia spent weeks covertly beefing up its military presence across the peninsula before taking control, overpowering the Ukrainians.

Moscow says Crimea was always Russian. Is that true?

No. Before the annexation, Crimea was part of independent Ukraine, known as the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the only self-governing region within unitary Ukraine.

The peninsula voted for Ukrainian independence in a referendum in 1991. Before that, it was part of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.

And while it’s true that Crimea was part of Russia for more than a century and a half – since it was annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783 until it was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 – this period is a relatively short blip in Crimea’s long written history, which dates back to 1,000 BC.

Over the course of the millennium, the peninsula was part of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, it was invaded by Mongols and fought over by Venice and Genoa.

For some 300 years, Crimea was under the control of Crimean Tatars, who are recognized as the peninsula’s indigenous people. After the 18th-century Russian annexation, the Tatar population lived through more than two centuries of persecution and exodus.

What has happened since?

Russia has imposed an increasingly brutal and repressive regime on Crimea and its people over the past 11 years, human rights observers say.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has repeatedly reported on the human rights violations allegedly committed by Russia in occupied Crimea – from unlawful detentions, to sexual abuse and torture, to forcing people to send their children to Russian schools and training programs.

Russia has repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses, despite substantial evidence and victim testimonies.

According to official data from the Ukrainian government, more than 64,000 have fled the peninsula to other parts of Ukraine since the annexation. However, Crimean NGOs estimate the number of refugees might be twice as high, as not everyone has officially registered with the government.

Meanwhile, Moscow has worked on its plan to “Russify” the peninsula. It put in place incentives to persuade Russian citizens to relocate to Crimea and the Ukrainian government estimated in 2023 that some 500,000 to 800,000 Russians had moved there permanently since it was annexed, with the number jumping sharply after the opening of the Kerch bridge that connects Crimea to Russia.

A senior Russian general has died in a car blast in the Russian city of Balashikha on Friday morning, according to authorities.

Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, was killed in the explosion of a Volkswagen Golf, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement.

The blast was caused by an improvised explosive device packed with shrapnel, it added.

The Investigative Committee said it has opened a criminal probe into the case. It added that an investigative team, including forensic experts and law enforcement officers, had begun examining the scene in Balashikha, which lies less than 20 miles east of Moscow.

Russian state news agency Tass earlier reported that an explosive device had blown up a car in the city, citing emergency services. Tass reported that the device was “homemade.”

Friday’s reported blast comes two days after a fire broke at an underground car park in Moscow’s business district following an explosion there.

Pope Francis never returned to his native Argentina after he became head of the Roman Catholic Church. But some of the faithful here believe he sent a final message home, in the unlikeliest but perhaps most appropriate of ways.

Francis was a lifelong soccer fan — and occasional youth goalkeeper — and a card-carrying member of his favorite club, San Lorenzo.

And it’s the number on that card that’s become the talk of Buenos Aires.

“It has to be destiny,” said Ramiro Rodríguez, who arrived wearing a rosary over his team shirt at a small chapel that’s the spiritual birthplace of the club, for a Mass to celebrate the life of Francis.

The number that’s causing the stir is assigned to “regular member” Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Pope’s birth name: 88235.

And as person after person has pointed out, Francis was 88 when he died, at 2:35 a.m. Argentina time on Easter Monday.

For Rodríguez, it was another otherworldly, even divine, connection.

“I went to the Vatican in 2019 and I wore my San Lorenzo (jersey), of course,” Rodríguez, 23, said. “I didn’t see him, but I knew he was there with all his energy and healing the world and that’s very significant to me.”

In a preface the late Pope contributed for an upcoming book by Cardinal Angelo Scola, he left an eloquent message about ageing and dying. “Death is not the end of everything, but the beginning of something,” he wrote.

Talking to those who knew him well, it seems likely he would also have appreciated the warmth and good nature of the desire to see a meaning in his soccer club membership number.

Omar Abboud knew how quick-witted his friend he still knew as Jorge was and how much he enjoyed a joke, but never at anyone else’s expense.

“He has a different kind of humor,” Abboud said of the Pope, “a kind of joke that was with the people, not over the people. He has an intelligent, smart humor.”

Abboud, a prominent Muslim leader in Argentina, formed The Institute of Interreligious Dialogue with then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Daniel Goldman in 2002. They visited each other’s communities and regularly held meetings and public exchanges to break down barriers between faith groups.

Abboud said he last visited the Pope in January, when the two spoke of artificial intelligence and how it could be regulated. He said he learned much from his friend Jorge and their discussions about literature and sacred texts. And he’s just beginning to talk about him in the past tense.

“He used to be a good friend, we need him. Really, words are not enough,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Francis is on the minds of everyone we meet — from his friends to people who admired him from afar, to those to whom he had ministered.

Flowers and messages are left in tribute at his childhood home, a square where he once played kickabout with other kids, and the church where he heard the call from God to join the priesthood. That church, the Basílica de San José de Flores, has an engraving marking the date when Francis received his vocation, while in the confessional — September 21, 1953.

So many candles have been burned to honor Francis that the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral are covered with wax.

Seven days of official mourning were declared to honor Francis in Argentina, but they won’t all be filled with sadness.

The Mass held at San Lorenzo’s chapel ended more as a pep rally and there will be another crowd for the soccer team’s next match on Saturday, a few hours after Francis is laid to rest in Rome.

The team will wear commemorative jerseys to honor the late pontiff, and there is talk a new stadium will bear the name “Papa Francisco.” In a sign of his humility, Francis once wrote he didn’t much like that idea.

A Swiss Guardsman used to keep Francis updated on match scores and San Lorenzo’s progress by leaving notes on his desk; the Pope has said he had not watched television — barring seismic events like 9/11 — since 1990.

Francis said his love for sport was not only for the competition — and San Lorenzo is only one of several teams in soccer-mad Buenos Aires, the capital of soccer-mad Argentina, whose men are the current World Cup champions — but for the participation.

He believed sports, especially team games, get young people away from their screens and shuttered virtual lives and teach them to be out in the world.

The club may have lost Regular Member 88235 but Buenos Aires will remember him.

A homemade flag at the cathedral linked Francis and San Lorenzo with a simple phrase that seems to apply to Buenos Aires today: “Mis Dos Amores,” my two loves.

Francis reciprocated that love, writing in his book “Hope:” “My homeland, for which I continue to feel just the same great, profound love. The people for whom I pray every day, who formed me, who trained and then offered me to others. My people.”

In Flores, the working-class neighborhood where Francis lived and worked, a woman left a note outside his childhood home.

It read: “You were one of us — an Argentine — and a gift to the world.”

Moscow has inflicted another round of deadly strikes on Ukraine despite US President Donald Trump’s plea for Russian President Vladimir Putin to “STOP!” attacking its neighbor.

At least eight people were killed in drone strikes across the country, a night after Russia launched its deadliest bombardment of Ukraine since the middle of last year.

A drone attack on the eastern city of Pavlohrad on Friday killed three people, including a 76-year-old woman and a child, and injured 10 others, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said.

In southern Ukraine, two people were also killed in strikes on Kherson, the region’s governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said, adding the strikes targeted critical infrastructure and residential buildings. Two more people died in attacks on Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, and one person was killed in Kharkiv in the northeast of the country, regional leaders said.

Ukraine’s capital Kyiv was the main target of Russia’s massive bombardment on Thursday, which hit several locations across the city, killing 12 people and wounding 87 others. Ukraine’s emergency services said on Friday that it had completed the search for survivors in the rubble of one residential block, hit by what Ukrainian authorities said was a North Korean ballistic missile.

The fresh round of attacks come after President Trump vented his frustration over the lack of progress on a peace deal on Thursday, saying he is “not happy” and urging Putin to “STOP!” the attacks, in a post on his Truth Social platform. Hours later, however, Trump said he believed both Russia and Ukraine want peace.

On Friday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to arrive in Moscow for further talks with Putin on reaching an agreement.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was “ready to reach a deal,” in an interview with CBS News on Thursday, but added that there were still some specific points that needed to be “fine-tuned.”

Earlier this week, Trump launched a new tirade against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of harming peace negotiations, after Zelensky said it was against his country’s constitution to recognize Russian control of Crimea, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Any move to recognize Russia’s control of Crimea would reverse a decade of US policy and could upset the widely held post-World War Two consensus that international borders should not be changed by force.

The spat over Crimea is the latest in a series of very public disagreements between Trump and Zelensky.

Trump has insisted he has been equally as tough on Putin, but got defensive on Thursday when asked by White House reporters what concessions Russia had made in the conflict.

“Stopping the war, stopping taking the whole country. Pretty big concession,” Trump said.

“We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia, and Russia knows that, and some people that are close to it know or he wouldn’t be talking right now.”

Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, is breaking with tradition when it comes to where he will be laid to rest – choosing a light-filled basilica instead of the grottoes of the Vatican.

Popes are usually buried within Vatican City, beneath St. Peter’s Basilica. But Francis will be the first pontiff in more than a century to be buried outside the Vatican, as he requested a “simple” tomb a couple of miles away in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore – also known as St. Mary Major.

Francis’ funeral will take place on Saturday in St. Peter’s Square, before his body is taken to the basilica – on the other side of the river in central Rome – for burial.

“The tomb must be in the earth; simple, without particular decoration and with the only inscription: Franciscus,” the pontiff said in his will, released by the Vatican. He also said the costs of his burial would be covered “by a sum provided by a benefactor.”

While Francis’ tomb will be humble, the basilica above it glitters with sunlight and gold. The ceiling is covered in gilded wood, and light pours in through high-up windows to illuminate intricate mosaics that line the nave. Mourners and visitors have flocked here in the days since Francis’s death, interested to see for themselves a place that he loved.

Perched on top of one of the seven hills on which ancient Rome was built, Santa Maria Maggiore is one of four papal basilicas. Its bell tower is the tallest in the Italian capital, rising to a height of 246 feet, and its position on the hill makes it the highest point in the city.

The legend goes that the Virgin Mary came to both Pope Liberius and an Italian aristocrat asking for the church to be constructed in her honor in a place that would be miraculously revealed. Rome’s Esquiline Hill was identified as the spot after snow fell on its summit in August of 358, at the height of summer. In contemporary times, a celebration marking the “Miracle of the Snow” takes place at the basilica on August 5 every year.

The church as it stands today was commissioned by Pope Sixtus III in the year 431. The mosaics date from that time, and the interior also boasts Classical columns plundered from other buildings, although it’s encased in a Neoclassical facade built in the 1700s.

The church has long held a special significance for Pope Francis, who used to visit on Sunday mornings to honor the Virgin Mary.

He would often visit the basilica before and after foreign trips, as well as after hospital stays, to pray to the most important Marian icon, the Salus Populi Romani, to which he entrusted the protection of his apostolic journeys, in keeping with Jesuit tradition.

Clearly a spot close to his heart, it’s where Francis began his first full day as leader of the Catholic Church in 2013. It is also the first place he visited after leaving the hospital last month, offering flowers to be placed before the icon of the Virgin Mary before returning to his residence in the Vatican.

Francis revealed his plans to be buried there in December 2023, explaining that he felt a “very strong connection” with the basilica. “I want to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore,” Francis said. “Because it is my great devotion.”

A “place is already prepared” for his burial, the pope said in 2023, adding that he had been working on streamlining papal funerals.

“We simplified them quite a bit,” Francis said. “I will premiere the new ritual,” he added with a smile at the time.

Although seven other popes are buried in Santa Maria Maggiore, Francis will be the first not to be interred in St. Peter’s Basilica since Leo XIII, who died in 1903 and was laid to rest in the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano. The last pope to be buried at Santa Maria Maggiore was Clement IX, back in 1669.

This is not the only time the pope has broken with tradition: Francis also refused to live in the Apostolic Palace, the official papal residence, instead choosing to live in a small apartment in the Vatican guesthouse, Santa Marta.

Throughout his life, he was known for eschewing luxuries. As a cardinal in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was known for taking the subway instead of using a chauffeured car. Later in his career, he would travel to work at the Vatican in an unassuming blue Ford Focus.

The day after his death, Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore was far busier than usual, with mourners, worshipers and other visitors coming by the hundreds. The atmosphere was filled with sentiment but not somber, and the afternoon Mass opened with a brass quintet and bright organ music.

“It was just a remarkable experience,” Kerry Bruder, 71, from Ontario, Canada, said after seeing the vast artworks and marble sculptures inside the church. “You know that people for centuries have been going in there… and it just made you feel small, but in a good way.”

Victoria Ferreira, who traveled to Rome from Brazil for Easter, said she had already visited the basilica days before – but it felt different after the pontiff’s death, adding that “it was very emotional.”

“He filled us with love, with empathy, with hope,” she said. “And I think we need to, more than ever, have this in our mind and in our actions – to be like him.”