The world’s superpowers met in 1945 in the Black Sea port of Yalta to divide up Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany. They drew lines on the map that tore apart countries, effectively delivered Eastern Europe to Soviet occupation and dismembered Poland. And none of those countries were represented or had a say.
As President Trump prepares to meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday in Alaska, there is more talk — and anxiety — among Ukrainians and Europeans about a second Yalta. They are not scheduled to be present, and Mr. Trump has said he plans to negotiate “land swaps” with Mr. Putin over Ukrainian territory.
“Yalta is a symbol of everything we fear,” said Peter Schneider, a German novelist who wrote “The Wall Jumper,” about the division of Berlin. At Yalta, the world itself was divided and “countries were handed to Stalin,” he said. “Now we see that Putin wants to reconstruct the world as it was at Yalta. For him, it begins with Ukraine, but that’s not his ending.”
Yalta, itself in Russian-annexed Crimea, has become a symbol for how superpowers can decide the fates of other nations and peoples. “It’s a linchpin moment, when the European world is divided in two and the fate of Europeans in the East is locked in without any possible say,” said Ivan Vejvoda, a Serb political scientist with the Institute for Human Sciences, a research institution in Vienna.
“Of course today’s world is different, but decisions are being made on behalf of third countries for whom this is an existential issue,” Mr. Vejvoda said.
The prospect that big powers might settle the fate of a third country that is not present is “a national trauma in most of Eastern Europe, including Estonia,” said Kadri Liik, an Estonian and Russia expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “That fear is always close to the surface, the fear that someone will sell us off or sell Ukraine off and that’s the start of a bigger process.”
Mr. Putin’s stated aims do not end with Ukraine. As a revisionist who wants to upend the current order, he has made clear he wants NATO to end any expansion, pull its troops out of any country that joined after 1997 — including all countries that had been under Soviet occupation and became members starting in 1999 — and negotiate a new “security architecture” in Europe that recognizes the old Soviet sphere of influence. He wants to divide the United States from Europe, if he can, to weaken or destroy the trans-Atlantic relationship created after World War II.
The Yalta meeting of the three “great powers” — Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States — took place in February 1945, after France and Belgium had been liberated and the defeat of Germany was inevitable. The summit was followed by a conference in Potsdam, Germany, in July, which reconfirmed the division of Europe into Western and Soviet spheres.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were both ailing and exhausted. Many in Eastern Europe came to believe that the two men had been taken in by the promises of Joseph Stalin that he would allow free elections in the countries occupied by the Red Army.
“Yalta has gone down in history as many things, but it became a dirty word in Eastern Europe and especially in Poland,” since a main topic of the conference was its new borders, said Serhii Plokhii, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard and the author of numerous books about the Cold War, including “Yalta: The Price of Peace.”
Charles de Gaulle was also not invited to Yalta, Mr. Plokhii noted. “Here we see clear parallels between de Gaulle and Europe and Poland and Ukraine,” he said. Europe’s major powers are also left out of the Alaska summit and plan to discuss the meeting virtually on Wednesday with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Of course, there are clear differences, Mr. Plokhii said. Stalin was troublesome but an ally, who had been instrumental in defeating the Nazis. Roosevelt and Churchill were doing what they could “to better the situation for the territories already occupied by the Red Army.”
They were not giving up territories the allies held or negotiating about the government of France, as Stalin wanted, he said. “So there were no real concessions on territories not already controlled by the Soviet Union.” And neither Washington nor London wanted to expand the war to drive out the Soviets, although Churchill later ordered contingency planning for such a conflict.
For Timothy D. Snyder, a historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, the Alaska summit is “morally less defensible” than the one in Yalta because Mr. Putin is not an ally, as Stalin was. “Although he was ruling a terrible system and oppressing as he liberated, the Soviets had just borne the brunt of the war in Europe, so it was inevitable to discuss with them a settlement at the end of the war,” he said.
But for Mr. Snyder, a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, there is a crucial difference with Yalta. It is Russia now, not Nazi Germany, that is “carrying out an unprovoked war and all its atrocities.” Russia is “not an ambiguous partner who helped end the war, but started the war.”
That Mr. Trump is engaging and negotiating with Mr. Putin, which former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was reluctant to do, is easily defensible because Russia is a combatant. But so is Ukraine, the critics argue, and President Volodymyr Zelensky should be there, even if Mr. Putin claims to regard him as illegitimate and Ukraine as artificial.
Today, Mr. Plokhii said, Mr. Putin wants Ukraine to hand over territories not occupied by Russia. So that also raises another controversial moment in history, at Munich in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain agreed with Adolf Hitler to dismantle Czechoslovakia, which was not represented at those talks, in a vain, doomed effort to keep the peace.
“We know Churchill and Roosevelt got some criticism over Yalta, but it was Chamberlain who became infamous,” Mr. Plokhii said.
Mr. Putin’s demand for unconquered Ukrainian territory is also similar to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, Mr. Snyder said. “If Ukraine is forced to concede the rest of the Donbas, it would concede defensive lines and fortifications crucial to its defense, which is what the Czechs had to do,” he said.
“Hitler’s aim was to destroy Czechoslovakia,” Mr. Snyder said, “and Putin’s ultimate goal is to destroy Ukraine.”
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.
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