I am leaving for Ukraine this week — as more than 100,000 Russian troops surround the country — to write about why its future matters to Americans. And to learn how Ukrainians feel about being treated as if it were 1945.
In February 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Josef Stalin carved up Europe between them, at the Yalta Conference in Crimea, with Winston Churchill looking on. These three men agreed that future governments of Eastern European countries would be “friendly” to the Soviet regime but could still hold free elections.
We know how that turned out: a divided European continent whose eastern half was severely repressed by the Soviets. That misery lasted until the bloc was liberated by the popular uprisings across Eastern Europe in 1989, and by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
