Putin and Trump's new Yalta
The 80th anniversary of the Conference between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill and the new goals of today's emperors to divide the world. Meanwhile, ongoing commemorations focus not on ending the war, but on what regime to install in Kyiv in the coming years.
Last week marked the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Conference, which was held from 4 to 11 February 1945 in Crimea, the peninsula on the Black Sea, where the current war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014.
The three victorious statesmen of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, met at the resort town. At present, Russian propaganda is working at giving its spin to the event with a series of exhibits, calling Crimea the “homeland of the UN" and "homeland of the new world order", even proposing to move the UN headquarters to Crimea "in the perspective of a new multipolar world".
This is what the two emperors, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, are preparing to talk about, and certainly the former dreams of using the Livadia palace, the summer residence of the last tsars, where the conference took place in 1945.
The "new Yalta" will instead be held on neutral ground, probably in Saudi Arabia, and the purpose will be similar to that of 80 years ago: to divide the world and proclaim the perennial state of war, no longer "cold", but "hybrid", as befits the digital and artificial nature of this new millennium.
It will not be the meeting of three winners, but of the twins of the great imperialisms of East and West, albeit with a shadow cast by the allies behind them, the unpredictable and weak Europe and the indecipherable and very powerful China.
The odd man out between Putin and Trump will be the derelict and martyred Ukraine, whose President Volodymyr Zelensky is now illegitimate in the eyes of both. By stating that "it is time to prepare for elections in Kyiv", that "Ukraine could also become Russian" and in any case "will not be part of NATO", Trump has in fact agreed with Putin on all the reasons for the war, like “overthrowing the Nazi regime" and bring the degenerated "little Russia" back under Moscow's control.
In the new Yalta, the Ukrainian dream of true sovereignty dissolves, its territorial integrity is now a thing of the past, territories are divided according to interests: the Americans are interested in rare earths for new technologies, the Russians in the coal of Donbass, to continue on their path of polluting energy, highlighting the difference between the two worlds.
Nor are the two economic systems opposed, like capitalism vs communism in the Cold War, in which it was easy to choose sides for ideological reasons one way or the other. The two worlds overlap for most people today, the past of "traditional values", hard as coal and dark as oil, and the future of "artificial intelligence", fluid as sexual genders and invisible as current forms of communication, which do not involve the physical presence of human beings.
Some journalists unearthed a curious fact as preparations got underway for the symbolic celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Yalta, a prelude to the great Victory parade in which the two emperors could stand together.
The bronze monument of the three victors in Livadia, sculpted in 2015 by the choirmaster of the new Russian power, Zurab Tsereteli, is in fact without a master, since no one budgeted for it, and so it lies in a state of neglect, with signs of rust on Roosevelt's cloak and Stalin's marshal coat, with ironic graffiti by patrons and the broken stone, even if the knees shine with the signs of popular devotion.
The head of the local Russian administration, Janina Pavlenko, promised to fix everything as soon as possible, to restore the symbolic meaning of the "great trinity of rulers" who had de-Nazified the whole world.
In reality, the Russian-Georgian sculptor Tsereteli, now 91 years old, is one of the masters of neo-imperial symbolism, to whom he has dedicated numerous imposing statues across Russia and the world, from Peter the Great to Vladimir the Baptiser, up to that of Saint Nicholas of Myra located in front of the basilica of Bari, donated by Vladimir Putin to honour the protector of Holy Russia.
Usually all his bronze figures have a common appearance, as if they were always a single character who brings together all the others, in the ambitious style of the "Russian world"; but the three victors respect the well-known images of the big three in the world, perhaps accentuating Stalin's threatening expression to reproduce the feelings of his latest successor in the Kremlin.
The monument was supposed to be ready for the 60th anniversary in 2005, but it was then installed for the 70th anniversary, and today it appears more necessary than ever in the 80th anniversary, to express the significance of current events.
On the eve of the celebrations, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) declassified several documents from the Yalta Conference, and several new publications on the historic event have been published, with a big conference that brought together students from all over the world on the theme “1945-2025: The Struggle for a New World Order and the Russian Initiative!” at the new Crimea Federal University, formerly a local Ukrainian university.
The meeting will reaffirm the Russian narrative of the history of the last century, condemned by the European Parliament on 23 January as "falsification of history" and manipulation of minds used to justify the current war.
As the EU High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Estonian Kaja Kallas, said, “Disinformation is a fundamental part of Russian military activities [. . .]. The frontline of this hybrid warfare runs through our own democracies, universities, parliaments, media and other institutions. It aims at creating distrust" and "sparking domestic divisions”.
It is no coincidence that Estonia is one of the ex-Soviet countries targeted by Putin's Russia, with some cities divided along the border between Russia and NATO.
Russia denies the historical circumstance of the occupation of the Baltic countries in 1940 following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the alliance with the Nazis that enabled Hitler's invasions of Europe, before Stalin decided to save the world.
Moscow also denies any responsibility for the massacre of the Katyn, while describing the invasion of Poland in 1939 as a form of "liberation", while the Russian narrative of the entry of Soviet troops in 1968 in Czechia and Slovakia claims that it was due to the demands of Ukrainians, frightened by the revolutionary uprising in Prague.
It is therefore not surprising that an attempt is being made to update the narrative of the Yalta Conference, not only by polishing the bronzes of Stalin and Roosevelt, but also as a "prophecy addressed to the new generations for how to act in the event of new conflicts", as the speaker of the Russian parliament of Crimea, Vladimir Konstantinov, stated.
According to this view, presented in the last round table in Sevastopol, the "spirit of Yalta indicates the need to delimit superpower spheres of influence,” and Poland in 1939 was guilty of "not having found its place" and for this reason had to "interrupt its existence" and divide itself between the USSR and Germany, underscoring how Ukraine is actually only the surface of the entire pyramid buried by the Kremlin's aims, the reflection of a much wider conflict, that with Poland and the whole of Europe.
Konstantinov triumphantly said that "in Ukraine Russia has already won", not so much for the territories it conquered, but for having imposed a new system of relations similar to that of the "world Soviet concentration camp", reflected today in the universal Russian world.
The Russian leader in occupied Crimea, however, acknowledges that "Trump is no Roosevelt", with only four years available instead of "the eternity thought out at the Yalta talks", considering that the then US president, a mythological figure in the eyes of the Russians also for inventing the atomic bombs, then used by his successor Harry Truman in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was already at death’s door, enfeebled by the illness that would kill him two months after Stalin’s embrace, who is a perfect precursor for Putin.
In the conferences marking the Crimean anniversary, the main topic is now not the end of the war, but what regime to install in Kyiv in the coming years, and one of the most often heard statements is that "the big loser in the Ukrainian crisis is Europe", starting with the countries that border Ukraine, who for centuries have been contesting its border territories such as the Lemko Region (Lemkivshchyna), the land of the Lemki or Rusiny, a variant of the East Slavs in the Carpathians; the Podlachia (also Podlasie), the land of the Podlashuks on the border with Belarus and Poland; the Nadsiannia or the "Curzon line"; and the Maramureș, another region of Carpathia also called Marmatia, and as far as Slovakia and Hungary, speaking of little-known European lands, with great symbolic significance.
In reality, at the Yalta Conference, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the real protagonist, the one who more than anyone else had believed in the possibility of establishing a secure and universal peace.
At that time, he represented the whole of Europe, its soul and its cultural and ethnic traditions, even if today his country is not part of the Union, but he showed Europe the way to follow, so as not to be crushed by the ambitions of the emperors of East and West.
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