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Yalta: World War Two summit that reshaped the world

In February 1945, three men met in a holiday resort to decide the fate of the world.

Nazi Germany was on its knees. Soviet troops were closing in on Berlin, while Allied forces had crossed Germany’s western border. In the Pacific, US troops were steadily but bloodily advancing towards Japan.

As their armies poised for victory, the so-called Big Three – US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin – agreed to meet in Yalta, a Soviet resort on the Black Sea.

At the end of the bloodiest conflict the world had ever known, 75 years ago, the Allies wanted to stop such devastation from ever happening again.

But both the US and the USSR wanted co-operation on their own terms. Despite the Yalta agreements, within months the stage was set for the Cold War – the struggle between the two new superpowers that split the globe into ideological camps for decades.

“If the goal at Yalta was to lay the basis for a genuinely peaceful post-war order, then the conference failed,” Prof Andrew Bacevich at Boston University told the BBC. “But given the contradictory aspirations of the US and USSR, that goal was never in the cards.”

What was happening in February 1945?

By the start of 1945 Nazi Germany had lost the war. The country maintained its bloody and increasingly desperate resistance, but the result of the conflict was no longer in doubt.

In eastern Europe, the Soviet Union had turned the tide and shattered Germany’s armies after four years of savage warfare.

But while the USSR was militarily triumphant – about three-quarters of all German troop casualties in the war died on the Eastern Front – the country had suffered terribly.

It is estimated that one in seven Soviet citizens, some 27 million people, died in the conflict – two-thirds of whom were civilians. Some academics put the numbers even higher.

The country’s cities and richest lands were devastated by the conflict. Industry, farms, homes and even roads had been wiped from the landscape.

What were the leaders’ goals?

Joseph Stalin was determined to get his country back on its feet. He came to Yalta seeking a sphere of influence in eastern Europe as a buffer zone to protect the USSR. He also wanted to divide Germany, to ensure it could never pose a threat again, and to take huge reparations – in money, machinery and even men – to help his shattered nation.

Stalin knew he would need the acceptance of the Western powers to achieve this.

Winston Churchill understood Stalin’s goals. The pair had met in Moscow in October 1944, and discussed the idea of carving Europe into spheres of influence for the USSR and the western powers. He also understood that the millions of Soviet troops that had pushed Germany out of central and eastern Europe far outnumbered the Allied forces in the west – and there was nothing the UK could do if Stalin chose to keep them there.