Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has said he is not currently aiming to regain control of Crimea, but suggested the issue could be revisited later. He said Crimea remained “very important” to Ukraine but suggested that “not losing people” was the more immediate priority. Prior to this shift in tone, Zelensky had for years insisted that Kiev would eventually reclaim all territories within Ukraine’s 1991 borders, including Crimea. Crimea broke away from Ukraine following the Western-backed Maidan coup in 2014 and subsequently voted in a public referendum to join Russia. Sergey Tsekov, first deputy chairman of Crimea’s State Council, described Zelensky’s latest remarks as “a step in the right direction” but dismissed his continued description of the peninsula as Ukrainian territory as “demented,”arguing it never legally belonged to Kiev in the first place.