Yalta Agreement

The Yalta Agreement was the set of decisions reached at the Yalta Conference, held from 4 to 11 February 1945 at the Livadia, Yusupov and Vorontsov palaces near Yalta in Crimea, where United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin met as the war in Europe neared its end. The three leaders agreed that a defeated Germany would be divided into separate occupation zones administered by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and, at Churchill's insistence, France, and that Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification; Stalin further committed the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan within roughly three months of Germany's surrender, in return for territorial concessions in East Asia. The agreement moved Poland's borders westward along the Curzon Line, promised free elections in the countries of liberated Europe under a Declaration on Liberated Europe, and set out the structure of a new United Nations organization, including a Security Council in which the major powers would hold a veto. Though celebrated at the time as proof of continuing Allied unity, the Yalta Agreement became bitterly controversial within a few years once Stalin failed to permit the free elections he had promised in Poland and across Eastern Europe, and the settlement it embodied is widely seen as having sealed the division of Europe into rival Soviet and Western spheres that defined the opening decades of the Cold War.