The anniversary of the Yalta Conference, which ended 80 years ago this week in a Soviet-occupied Crimean resort on the Black Sea, has a special significance in central and eastern Europe—and not just because it took place in a Ukrainian city that Russian soldiers once again occupy.
At the time, in the U.S and allied countries, the agreement between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin was hailed as a historic breakthrough, one step away from the end of World War II and proof positive that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would continue to cooperate in the postwar era. The countries in what would soon be known as the Soviet sphere of influence felt no such euphoria. They understood right away, as Americans would learn in coming months, that the upshot of the conference was to cement Soviet control over a broad swath of eastern Europe—countries from Ukraine to Estonia, more than a thousand miles north.
It’s an anniversary that holds important lessons for Donald Trump, unlikely as it is that he is reading history as he prepares to sit down with Vladimir Putin and perhaps once again carve up the territory in this much-contested corner of Europe.
