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. As President Trump prepares to meet President Putin 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 Trump has said he plans to negotiate “land swaps” with Putin over Ukrainian territory. “Yalta is a symbol of everything we fear,” said Peter Schneider, who wrote “The Wall Jumper,” about the division of Berlin. At Yalta, the world was divided and “countries were handed to Stalin,” he said.Yalta, itself in Russian-annexed Crimea, is a symbol for how superpowers can decide the fates of other nations. “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. “Today’s world is different, but decisions are being made on behalf of third countries for whom this is an existential issue,” Vejvoda said.Putin’s stated aims do not end with Ukraine. As a revisionist, he wants a new “security architecture” in Europe that recognizes the old Soviet sphere of influence.The Yalta meeting of the UK, the Soviet Union and the US, took place in Feb 1945, after France and Belgium had been liberated and the defeat of Germany was inevitable. The summit was followed by a conference in Germany which reconfirmed the division of Europe into Western and Soviet spheres.Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were both ailing. Many believed 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,” since a main topic of the conference was its new borders, said Serhii Plokhii, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard.Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French Forces during the World War II, was also not invited to Yalta, Plokhii noted. “Here we see clear parallels between de Gaulle and Europe and Poland and Ukraine,” he said. Of course, there are clear differences, 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, as Stalin wanted, he said.Today, Plokhii said, 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 doomed effort to keep peace.Putin’s demand for unconquered Ukrainian territory is similar to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, Timothy Snyder, a historian of the Cold War, said. “If Ukraine is forced to concede the rest of the Donbas, it would concede defensive lines, which is what Czechs had to do,” he said. “Hitler’s aim was to destroy Czechoslovakia,” Snyder said, “and Putin’s goal is to destroy Ukraine.”
