The Trump-Putin Summit Has the ‘Smell of Yalta and Munich’

PUBLISHED on August 14, 2025, 7:39 PM, EDT – Key Points and Summary: As Presidents Trump and Putin prepare to meet in Alaska, historical parallels to the disastrous Munich and Yalta conferences are being drawn.

-Analysts fear a repeat of “appeasement,” where a great power deal is made over the head of a smaller nation.

-The most dangerous parallel is to the 1938 Munich Agreement; if Ukraine is pressured to cede its “fortress belt” in the Donbas—its most defensible territory—it could be left as vulnerable as Czechoslovakia was after giving up the Sudetenland, paving the way for a future, larger Russian invasion.

The Alaska Summit Problem? It Could Be Yalta or Munich 2.0

How are history-minded correspondents analyzing the developments in the war in Ukraine and the Great Powers’ contest that surrounds them to this day?

What might Russian President Vladimir Putin do?

How might United States President Donald Trump react? How will Ukraine be either championed or sacrificed at this coming weekend’s summit in Alaska—and how much of this have we seen before?

They are all part of the same old question we are accused of asking once again: “What time is it in military history?”

Watching the commentary leading up to the Alaska event, TV talking heads are all reaching for an insightful historical parallel. They fear that a great mistake is about to be repeated—that Ukraine might be forced to accept an inequitable agreement imposed upon it.

An agreement dictated by larger countries to smaller ones can yield short-term benefits, but at the cost of long-term catastrophic consequences. The specter thrown up just this evening on a major news network is how—and where—this could be history repeating itself.

“This could end up being like the Yalta Conference,” said one of the program hosts. The reference is to the decisions by then US President Franklin Roosevelt at this gathering in February 1945 with British PM Winston Churchill and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The meeting of the three literally ended up cementing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe for more than half a century.

“The Yalta Conference is for many people—especially here in Poland—a symbol of the West’s betrayal,” reads a historical article written last year. “The saying ‘a second Yalta’ has in a sense entered the canon of Polish politics, and signifies present-day suspicions that the West is seeking an agreement with Russia by going over Poland’s head.”

“Only in today’s version”, said a colleague in Kyiv on August 13, “it means going over Ukraine’s head.”

Ukraine Must Be at the Table

But it is not the Yalta scenario that is the most appropriate analogy for what could be the unhappy consequence of the upcoming Alaska summit.

The scenario that has the greater potential to follow is that of the September 1938 Munich Conference.

Many of the same elements are present. Notably, just as the Czechs were excluded from the deliberations that handed the territory occupied by a German-speaking diaspora in the Sudetenland over to Nazi Germany, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will not be in the room when the American and Russian presidents meet.

The Munich Conference has given birth to the heavily pejorative term of “appeasement.” It is a label stuck onto any negotiated settlement in which a group of civilized nations end up sacrificing a smaller one and bowing to the will of a despotic state in the process. Agreements of this kind are also seen as the product of gullible and naïve Western thinking about international relations.

In the case of Munich, the agreement that was heralded as bringing “peace in our time” instead was followed by a full-scale world war that began only 11 months later. To their credit, the European leaders of today appear to have learned the lesson of what not to do this time.

None other than German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated, “Ukraine must be at the table when follow-up meetings take place.” Merz commented on an online conference with Trump and European leaders. He added that “a ceasefire must come first” before any peace negotiations.

It Would Leave Ukraine Defenseless

The biggest threat to Ukraine from this process is the potential disaster of Russia’s forces continuing their push in the eastern Donbas region. Then, Putin can try using those gains to demand the entirety of the Donetsk province as a territorial concession in negotiations.

Such a move would give Moscow a significant advantage on the battlefield, according to the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

“Handing over a huge piece of the Donetsk region to Putin would force the Ukrainians to abandon their most effective defensive line of the ‘fortress belt’ cities,” said a former senior NATO official who spoke to National Security Journal.

The fortress belt is a chain of four large cities and other towns that runs north to south for over 30 miles along Donetsk’s H-20 Kostyantynivka-Slovyansk highway.

“The Russians have been trying to crack this defensive line since 2014, but they cannot do it. They cannot beat the Ukrainians in the Donbas, and they cannot take this territory, so they are trying to get the US and its allies to take it away from Ukraine and give it to them,” he said. “It would leave Ukraine defenseless.”

This is where the worst parallels with the Sudetenland enter. That part of the Czechoslovak nation that bordered Germany and Austria was also where all the fortifications that the Czech military were counting on to hold the Germans back were located. Handing it over to the Nazis left that country defenseless, literally.

This history is why Putin is pushing for the Donbas to be given to him. Just like the Germans did seven months after the Munich Pact, the Russians could have just later walked in with ease, and Ukraine would have lost the means to keep Putin from swallowing huge tracts of their territory.

In an article for the Substack Faridaily, Russian analysts Farida Rustamova and Margarita Liutova write that their sources in Moscow explain that after over a million dead, wounded, and missing Russian soldiers, Putin cannot stop the war without something he can “sell to the Russian public as a win.”

“Putin is like every other murderous dictator we have ever seen,” said a think tank analyst here in Warsaw. “Just like China’s XI Jinping, he is always looking for a way to win without fighting.”

US policy makers do not understand these basic aspects of despotic rulers, said the think-tank specialist.  It is a lack of understanding that imperils us all —particularly the Ukrainians.

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson

Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the US Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.

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