Why Putin needs a new Yalta The conference meant compromise

If you know anything about the Yalta Conference, it’s probably that picture. You know the one: three war-weary leaders, sitting side-by-side, Roosevelt with his toothy smile, Churchill all eyebrows — and Stalin, grinning under his moustache, visibly pleased at the outcome. It’s an amazingly powerful image, and not merely because it’s come to epitomise the start of a Cold War that carved up Europe for decades. For many Russians, after all, the conference, 80 years old this week, isn’t merely a historical artefact. It speaks, rather, to opportunities for the Motherland in the here and now. 

Through the lens of Putinism, the global stage in 2025 looks remarkably similar to 1945. Russia’s sphere of influence, and even its heartland, is under threat from forces to its west. But like 80 years ago, in the eyes of Kremlin ideologues, Russia is pushing back the tide, militarily and civilisationally too. But think again to that picture: and who Stalin is slouched with. Not some lackeys from the Politburo, but his two rivals, who both, in their way, would help dictate his country’s imperial ambitions for decades to come. That, for me, is the real lesson of Yalta eight decades on — not that Russia was naturally destined to dominate Eurasia, but that it can only succeed with help from the West. 

Even before Russia really existed, its rulers leaned on outsiders. Consider the early 17th century, the so-called Time of Troubles, when Muscovy was beset by succession crises, civil wars, and foreign incursions by the Swedish Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the popular version of history most Russians know, Michael Romanov, the first tsar of Russia’s most storied house, was crowned in 1613 only after collaborating with foreigners. Nationalist epics, notably the 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, have paraded him as an austere hero, who fled the invading Poles instead of submit. In truth, his uncle supported Polish efforts to put a foreigner on the Russian throne, while Michael himself even lived for a time in the Polish-occupied Kremlin. 

It’s a thread woven through the long centuries of Russia’s history, as it struggled to overcome the geographic prison that is Eurasia. Despite giving Russia ample space to expand, its geographic position leaves it vulnerable to land invasions from both the east and the west. Flanked, moreover, by mountains to the south, the Arctic ice to the north, and European competitors to the west, it traditionally had scant opportunities to develop its naval strength — vital for any modern superpower. Getting creative about securing sea access, and acquiring plenty of colonial possessions to act as buffers, was crucial if Russia wanted to be anything beyond a backwater outpost along the Moskva River. 

In practice, this could only happen through collaboration with outsiders, something clear enough far beyond the Time of Troubles. In the final decades of the 18th century, for instance, Russia had no qualms about flexing its military muscles. Yet when it came to vanquishing its old rival Poland-Lithuania, it relied on deal-making to carve up the Polish state alongside Austria and Prussia. In the process, it drew up a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, finalised at the Congress of Vienna and which mostly endured until 1914. It was a similar story at sea. Snatching windows on the Black Sea and the Baltic would have meant very little if Russia hadn’t equally secured passage through the Bosphorus (from the Ottomans) and the Kattegat (from Denmark) into the seven seas beyond.

Not, of course, that this heritage has stopped Russian rulers from parading their would be independence. All nationalisms are, to an extent, based on narrative-building and historical erasure, and just as A Life for the Tsar lionised Tsar Michael for the St Petersburg nobility, so too have these themes endured into the 20th century. That’s clear enough from Russian narratives about the Great Patriotic War, which describe how 20 million Soviets gave their lives to defeat the German invaders. 

That sacrifice is indisputable: but Russia’s victory in Berlin would have been meaningless had it not been accepted by the Western superpowers. For if Nazi rule in Europe was undone at Stalingrad and Kursk, what came later was decided between 4-11 February 1945, at Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill gave Stalin their blessing to establish a new European order. In the space of just a week, Stalin convinced his allies to let him extend his reach right across Eastern Europe, annexing the Baltic States and adding a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to his sphere of influence. 

For Russian elites accustomed to thinking in historic cycles, a revised geopolitical compact, a Yalta 2.0, is therefore unsurprisingly long overdue. Not that we should think Putin is keen on just another power-grab. His famous 2005 quip that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” has been interpreted as a glib expression of Soviet nostalgia — but beneath the surface lurked a deeper fear. A new age had indeed arrived, but an updated balance of power to replace the Cold War order was never established, leaving Russia rudderless in wild geopolitical waters. 

To an extent, then, Putin has long felt America’s unipolar moment was simply a delusion, an aberration of history that stubbornly denied the geopolitical realities of Russian power. And with American dominance now sliding, Putin can equally point to the revival of multipolarity, with great powers from Beijing to Delhi establishing geopolitical centres. To rephrase, then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about that country alone. Rather, it was Putin’s attempt to force America and the West to confront what it sees as its natural rights, to settle the destabilising ambiguity between where Russia’s sphere of influence ends and where America’s starts, and to finally restore balance on Moscow’s terms — the wishes of the locals from Kharkiv to Aleppo be damned. 

But just as it always has, Russia cannot set up this new international system alone — despite what he might claim, Putin relies just as much on the West as his precursors in the Kremlin. One good example is that perennial quest for warm-water ports, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria forcing Moscow to pursue good relations with its revolutionary successor. In an irony of history, and thanks to Ankara’s influence in Damascus, Russia is again forced to bargain with Turks to keep its empire afloat. On the far side of its territory, meanwhile, Russia must reckon with the presence of Nato states like Norway and Canada, as they race to establish facts-on-the-water while the ice caps melt. Faced with America and China, certainly, brute force alone is not a realistic option. 

Putin will also be conscious of what happens when Russia tries to act unilaterally. Following the October Revolution, in 1917, communist fervour compelled the Bolsheviks to spread their revolution westwards. Eschewing the diplomatic waltzing of the tsars, they rejected dialogue with Europe’s bourgeois states. Following some initial successes — against newly independent Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — they were stopped by the Poles at the gates of Warsaw. After defeat in 1920, Lenin was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, delineating the Soviet Union’s boundary with Poland. The young USSR thus had little to show for this brute display of force, and had failed to regain much of the territory Nicholas II had lost through the First World War. 

Stalin’s approach two decades later took vital lessons from this historic mistake, combining the military might of the Red Army with clever diplomatic manoeuvring at Yalta. Through tough negotiating and sleights of hand, Stalin convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to accept a dramatic expansion of Soviet territory, alongside a bevy of buffer states from Bulgaria to Hungary. In exchange, Stalin promised to hold free elections in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, a vow he never had any intention of keeping. The results of this manoeuvring spoke for themselves: Russia extended its power further than it ever had under the tsars, and governments as far west as Berlin answered directly to Moscow. 

These days, there are signs that Putin is ready to talk once more. Even before he attacked his neighbour, he had effectively demanded that Nato expel all new members since 1997. That was clearly unrealistic — but nonetheless hinted at an awareness, somewhere behind that inscrutable facade, that negotiations with the West were necessary. That’s doubly true now there’s someone new in the White House. An instinctive dealmaker, ruthless and transactional, Donald Trump may be the partner Putin needs to formalise the bounds of Russia’s new empire, establish a new balance of power in Europe, and ultimately lay down the ground rules of international relations for the rest of the century. 

The President’s other foreign ventures speak vividly to this shift. With Trump on the verge of launching a trade war with the EU, and pushing to construct a new geopolitical pole stretching from Greenland to Panama, Putin’s threats, once fantastical, now seem eminently achievable. And if all this clearly has significant implications for Ukraine — American recognition of Russian sovereignty over swathes of the country beckon — a range of far-reaching issues are also on the agenda for a future Trump-Putin meeting. Among other things, that includes nuclear arms control and energy prices. Worryingly for the Europeans, meanwhile, it’s becoming ever clearer that any such summit will exclude Ukraine, at least at first, and that Trump won’t merely represent the United States, but rather personify Nato and the whole Western world. Putin certainly sees him that way: with the precedent of Yalta at his back, he’ll view the talks as a generational opportunity to clarify the global playing field from the Pacific to the Danube. 

That still leaves the question: what exactly might Putin try and secure from his negotiations with Trump? Once more, Yalta is a guide. Trump himself may see Europe as a sideshow, but for Putin, like Stalin before him, it will always be ground zero for the country’s ambitions. Ukraine may have replaced Poland as the primary object of Russian geopolitical manoeuvring, but like in 1945, conversations about its future will form only the backdrop for wider questions about Russia’s sphere of influence. Moldova and Georgia are two obvious candidates here, even as Hungary and Romania, both firmly within the Nato orbit, could yet be up for discussion. 

In other words, then, whether or not Ukraine is eventually included in the talks will ultimately be irrelevant. For Putin, the country is little more than an American puppet, and for Trump, it’s a burden. Like Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in 1945, Ukraine’s fate will be decided by Russia and the United States alone, and any subsequent involvement by Kyiv will be little more than window dressing. Once again, we’ve seen this play before. Harry Truman wholeheartedly disagreed with the terms Roosevelt had reached with Stalin — but by the time he took office after FDR’s death, it was too late, and he had no choice but to rubber-stamp Yalta at the Potsdam Conference five months later. 

In the end, the green light Moscow received from America was a more powerful tool for its expansionist ambitions than any tank or bomb. Even so, Soviet leaders saw no hint of irony when they played the orchestral finale of A Life for the Tsar at their victory parade in June 1945, a musical retreat to a Russia that never truly existed. Eight decades on, if Yalta 2.0 does indeed come to pass, it will be curious to see if Putin goes for the opera once more. Either way, Michael Romanov would surely be proud.

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Michal Kranz is a freelance journalist reporting on politics, society and defence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He runs The Eastern Flank, a Substack newsletter focused on Eastern European geopolitics.

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