The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is among those who have expressed concern that the world will witness a Yalta 2.0 moment if Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin meet trilaterally, as expected, on the sidelines of the Apec summit in China next week.
It is a truism in diplomacy that if you are not around the table, the risk is that you, or your values, are on the menu and about to be carved up. Many excluded from the summit in Shenzhen, principally Ukraine but also eastern Europe and Baltic countries, Taiwan and even Iran, have reason to be nervous that their sponsors might abandon them in a complex geopolitical trade-off that Putin envisions, and Trump seems to endorse.
Putin has long proposed this re-enactment of the greatest wartime summit, held in February 1945 at Joseph Stalin’s insistence in a rundown Tsarist resort on the south coast of Crimea alongside Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Yalta was a surrender to the Soviet Union.
A capitulation that saw Russian soldiers captured by the Germans forcefully handed back to Stalin and almost certain death.
I doubt Trump will make the same mistakes.
