For Ukraine, history is a battlefield. A few months before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion, he published a gloomy 5,000-word article with which he claimed to dismantle the country. In his speech marking the beginning of the Russian attack, he unveiled a string of historical dissatisfaction with the West. And in the months following the war he cast himself on as the successor to Russian modern emperor Peter the Great.
History lessons are now plaguing Ukraine once again. As President Donald Trump seeks to end the negotiations for the war, politicians and critics are looking for the right analogy to explain the unstable moments in which Ukraine finds itself and measures the risks they face in the diplomatic process.
Although the similarities are inaccurate, the present moment resonates with three important chapters of 20th century diplomatic history. It was in Munich in 1938, Yalta in 1945, and Budapest in 1994.
Munich Pact – The deal that handed over the Sdetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany to avoid war in Europe is the grandfather of historic analogy.
For many years it has become a handy shorthand to soften it. Trump critics liken the willingness to meet Putin one-on-one in Alaska, and his suggestion that Ukraine might have to accept the loss of territory is falsely in the wrong of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain taking Hitler in his words.
“Trump’s magical thinking threatens Munich in slow motion – repeating the mitigation mistakes,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal wrote about X. By softening it, Trump will not approach the Nobel Peace Prize more than Chamberlain. ”
However, there are also specific military angles to Munich’s comparisons. This deal allowed the Nazis to bypass the extensive network of fortress, essentially rendering Czechoslovakia vulnerable. Similarly, military analysts have noted that if Russia is allowed to occupy the rest of Ukraine’s Donetsk region with a peace agreement, it could control Putin over fortress cities such as Slobiansk and Kramatalk, which form an important part of Kiev’s defensive belt.
Another historical similarity was the 1945 Yalta Conference. This is a meeting that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin set the terms of the post-World War II order in Europe.
Yalta’s legacy, which was then considered a victory in wartime diplomacy, is today seen in a more pessimistic lens, particularly in Eastern European countries. In Eastern European countries in particular, they ultimately placed them behind iron curtains and commissioned millions of people to live under communist rule.
For some observers, Trump’s push for a potential grand bargain with Putin also poses the risk of selling out Kiev, especially if it could be negotiated on the heads of Ukrainians when possible.
In a post from X before the Trump Putin conference in Alaska, the former US ambassador for Russia wrote:
Not surprising, Putin is a fan of great deals. In a speech at the 2015 UN General Assembly — the eve of his country’s military intervention in Syria — Putin approved Yalta, saying that the security architecture that Hanmankoh was attacked at the Soviet resort “helped passing through the turbulence.”
Historian Sergey Radchenko, responding to McFaul’s post on X, offered a nuanced view of the Yalta analogy, noting in a lengthy thread that “Yalta had no realistic alternatives because by February 1945 the Soviets were already rolling over Eastern Europe. FDR was not in a position to expel them from there. The only thing he could do was to extract hollow promises of elections from Stalin.”
But Yalta’s options aren’t just the diplomatic instruments available today, as the US doesn’t need Russia for anything and can help constrain Moscow’s ambitions. “Russia, far from conquering Eastern Europe, cannot even conquer Donbas,” he wrote. “In short, just as Yalta had no viable alternatives, Yalta 2.0 has a very viable alternative, which should have given the Trump administration a considerable advantage in negotiating with Russia.”
Budapest Memorandum
As European allies seek to find security guarantees for Ukraine, memories of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum also peer in the memory of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the country agreed to abandon nuclear weapons parked in its territory after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The scrap of paper, signed by Russia, contained a pledge to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. These promises did not spare Ukraine from the annexation of Russia’s Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Speaking about CNN, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko suggested that the security guarantees outlined in the memorandum are too teeth-free.
“As the president of Ukraine, I had security guarantees in the form of a memorandum of understanding in Budapest,” he said. “This is not working. Other security guarantees except for the binding (one) – this is not acceptable.”
Ukraine is currently facing another historic point of inflection as diplomats scramble to find the right venue and the right formula for the peace conference. It remains to be seen whether this moment will be remembered as a dark chapter in European history.
