On February 11, 2025 at 3:00 PM, a public discussion "Yalta. The consequences of Conciliation" will be held in the Main Building of the War Museum.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Yalta Peace Conference, which resulted in the reformatting of the world order for the next decades. It was decided to establish the United Nations with the Security Council and its permanent members. In fact, the hegemony of the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe was consolidated. Germany was to be divided and reduced in size, and all citizens of the USSR who found themselves on its territory were to be returned.
For Ukrainians, like many other peoples, the decisions made by the leaders of the USSR, the United States, and Great Britain became a fait accompli. The western border of the Ukrainian SSR was fixed, cutting off the Kholmshchyna, Nadsyannya, and Lemkivshchyna from the main ethnic massif, and their inhabitants were to be resettled in the Ukrainian SSR; the border of the Western world, whose help in the liberation of Ukraine was hoped for, was being pushed beyond the zone of Soviet occupation in Germany. The only “bonus” that was supposed to remind us of the Ukrainian issue was the inclusion of the Ukrainian SSR, along with the Belarusian SSR, among the co-founders of the United Nations.
The word “Yalta” became a symbol of acquiescence to total evil. For some nations, such as the Poles, the word “Yalta” was a symbol of national tragedy, just as the word ‘Munich’ was for the Czechs, when the West compromised the principles of democracy and the sovereignty of individual nations to solve “global” problems.
During the proposed discussion, the participants will discuss the real consequences of the Yalta Conference decisions for Ukraine, Europe and the world, the geopolitical contexts of such a “concert of world powers” after the Second World War, and the threats of similar scenarios in the present, given the frequent references to the Yalta Conference decisions as a certain model for the Kremlin dictator Putin. It is also planned to discuss the level of representation of the topic of the policy of conciliation in the professional literature and in the museum sphere.
The participants of the discussion:
- Yurii Savchuk, Ph.D. in History, Director General of the War Museum;
- Oleksandr Lysenko, Professor, Doctor of History, Head of the Department of Military and Historical Studies of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine;
- Yurii Nikolaiets, Professor, Doctor of History, Head of the Department of Political Culture and Ideology at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine;
- Oleh Mashevskyi, Doctor of History, Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of Foreign Countries of the Faculty of History of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
The event will take place in the space of the exhibition “War: Reverse Perspective”.
