Annexation of Crimea has put Yalta back in Russian hands for the first time since the end of the Cold War

Putin’s reconquest of Yalta

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y Marc Thiessen

At the AEI Annual Dinner Tuesday night, Congressman Steve King (R-IA) pointed out to me how little notice has been given to the fact that the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea has put Yalta back in Russian hands for the first time since the end of the Cold War. He’s right.

For half a century Yalta was synonymous with the division of Europe. It was at the Soviet Black Sea resort that Roosevelt and Churchill met with Stalin and effectively assented to the Soviet domination of Eastern and Central Europe. The division of the continent into spheres of influence lasted for four-and-a-half decades.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Yalta was “liberated” along with the rest of Central and Eastern Europe – becoming part of a free and independent Ukraine. And since then, Yalta has been invoked a symbol of a past to which we must never return.

In November 2002, President George W. Bush went to Lithuania and promised that there would be “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas.” A few years later in Poland, Bush declared that “Europe must finally overturn the bitter legacy of Yalta.”

Now Vladimir Putin is seeking to “overturn the bitter legacy” of the Soviet dissolution, and restore the spirit of Yalta — and with Moscow’s domination of the former Soviet republics.

So Putin’s reconquest of Yalta is dripping with symbolism. Too bad so few in the West seem to notice, much less care.

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