Trump and Putin Could Decide Others’ Fates, Echoing Yalta Summit

The world’s superpowers met in 1945 in the Black Sea port of Yalta to divide up Europe after the defeat of Nazi Germany. They drew lines on the map that tore apart countries, effectively delivered Eastern Europe to Soviet occupation and dismembered Poland. And none of those countries were represented or had a say.

As President Trump prepares to meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday in Alaska, there is more talk — and anxiety — among Ukrainians and Europeans about a second Yalta. They are not scheduled to be present, and Mr. Trump has said he plans to negotiate “land swaps” with Mr. Putin over Ukrainian territory.

“Yalta is a symbol of everything we fear,” said Peter Schneider, a German novelist who wrote “The Wall Jumper,” about the division of Berlin. At Yalta, the world itself was divided and “countries were handed to Stalin,” he said. “Now we see that Putin wants to reconstruct the world as it was at Yalta. For him, it begins with Ukraine, but that’s not his ending.”

Yalta, itself in Russian-annexed Crimea, has become a symbol for how superpowers can decide the fates of other nations and peoples. “It’s a linchpin moment, when the European world is divided in two and the fate of Europeans in the East is locked in without any possible say,” said Ivan Vejvoda, a Serb political scientist with the Institute for Human Sciences, a research institution in Vienna.

“Of course today’s world is different, but decisions are being made on behalf of third countries for whom this is an existential issue,” Mr. Vejvoda said.

The prospect that big powers might settle the fate of a third country that is not present is “a national trauma in most of Eastern Europe, including Estonia,” said Kadri Liik, an Estonian and Russia expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “That fear is always close to the surface, the fear that someone will sell us off or sell Ukraine off and that’s the start of a bigger process.”