U.S. President George W. Bush rained heavily on Russian President Vladimir Putin's 60th anniversary war-end parade when he said the United States had renounced the Yalta agreement that conceded to Moscow postwar control over Eastern Europe. Putin had every right to be annoyed.
Yalta was in February 1945, and Bush was born in June 1946. So he probably found it hard to realize that Yalta simply recognized a reality at the time -- namely that Moscow already controlled East Europe. And how about Moscow's many concessions at Yalta? Can they be revoked, too?
If not for those concessions, a slew of other territories -- Greece, Turkey, Iran, Manchuria, Finland, Berlin, much more of Germany, Austria, all of the Korean Peninsula, and even northern Hokkaido -- could have ended up under full or partial Soviet control.
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