80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference: more relevant to today’s geopolitics than ever before
We each have our own preferred topics for research and publishing, and I am no different from my academic and journalist peers in this respect. However, I am on frequent call from one or another media outlet from a variety of countries requesting interviews which interrupt my personal agenda and compel me to take a look at issues that had not been on my ‘to do’ list.
Thus it was earlier this morning when I went to my computer to do a quick preparation for an interview with the Russian commercial television station NTV later today that will be included in the documentary video on the Yalta Conference they have scheduled to air on the weekend.
Why Yalta? Why now?
Last Friday, 27 January, Russians commemorated the 81st anniversary of the lifting of the Blockade of Leningrad. On the same day, Europeans and invited guests from North America were commemorating in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland) the 80th anniversary of the liberation of survivors of that death camp by the Red Army of the USSR, albeit without any representative of the Russian Federation having been invited.
Meanwhile, on 4th February, less than a week from now, the Russians will be ‘celebrating’ the 80th anniversary of the opening of a Conference in the Crimean city of Yalta between the Allied leaders Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The end of the war in Europe was approaching. Soviet (Russian) troops were just 65 kilometers from Berlin after rolling back the German Wehrmacht from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. This Conference decided the allocation of spheres of influence and control in post-war Europe….and not only in Europe insofar as this was also when the entry of the USSR into the war against Imperial Japan was decided, together with what territorial concessions Moscow would get in the Far East for its participation. For those with an appreciation of irony, please note that at the time, the Crimea was still an integral part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic; its transfer to Ukraine came later, under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev.
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The Wikipedia entry on the Yalta Conference tells us in its summary of the points in the ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe,’ the closing document signed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, that “Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification.”
My reading of the Declaration shows that those precise words do not appear there, though the overarching principles they represent surely are there in the conditions for dismemberment of Germany, for payment of reparations and for trying Nazi war criminals. Why is this important? Because it is perfectly clear that Vladimir Putin had in mind the timing of Yalta in the final days of Europe’s deadliest war to that time; who participated in Yalta, namely the leaders of the principal military powers of the time; and what they agreed to, namely a geopolitical solution based on the national interests of the victor(s).
What I am saying is that Vladimir Putin clearly had in mind a Yalta type conference as the wished-for outcome when in December 2021 he presented his demands to the United States and to NATO for revising the security architecture in Europe. It is also highly likely he had in mind negotiations going still further with Washington to take in Eurasia as a whole, all the way out to the Pacific Region.
“Demilitarization and denazification.” These were the stated objectives of the Special Military Operation which Vladimir Putin delivered his televised address to his nation just ahead of launching his invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Why are the above observations important? Because of their relevance to the coming discussions between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump over the end of the Ukraine war. From the standpoint of the Kremlin, the war with Ukraine is already over, just as effectively the War in Europe was already over in February 1945. The Russians have won. What they want to talk about with Trump is precisely the security architecture of Eurasia, and this gives the American president the opportunity to bury the rubble of the disastrous, failed campaign of the Biden Administration to impose a strategic defeat on Russia under the edifice of a new global age of peace within the terms of a Yalta 2.0 agreement in which everyone wins.
Logically this Yalta 2.0 agreement should go further than allocation of spheres of influence, just as Yalta 1.0 did when it set out guidelines for implementing plans to establish the United Nations. The additional dimensions today should cover the outstanding issues on global strategic stability that restore prohibitions on deployment of medium range ballistic missiles and ensure that no country enjoys the illusion of having a first strike capability against competitors or adversaries. For these talks, just as with respect to spheres of influence in the Far East, it is obvious that the People’s Republic of China should be a party to the talks.
Needless to say, all of these issues cannot be resolved in a single Summit meeting, just as Yalta was not the first or the last meeting to establish the contours of the post-WWII world among the victors. But the coming Putin-Trump meeting can lay down the principles of the way forward and set up working groups to deal with the details.
The question of the moment is who will describe this path to the Nobel Prize for Peace to the occupant of the Oval Office.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025