This Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and their respective teams conferred for hours in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Beyond the established resumption of diplomatic work at each country’s respective embassies, a possible meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as views on the war in Ukraine were discussed.
“We didn’t just listen, we really heard each other,” said Foreign Minister Lavrov afterwards.
The meeting was the first between Washington and Moscow since Russia’s full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine some three years ago. The talks and the way they are structured have caused consternation, especially as representatives from neither Ukraine nor the EU were present. Before the US-Russian sit-down, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy clearly stated that Kyiv would not accept any agreements made for it in absentia.
Speaking with reporters from the news agency Agence France Press (AFP) in Ankara, Turkey, Zelenskyy said: “Ukraine, Europe in a broad sense — and this includes the European Union, Turkey and the UK — should be involved in conversations and the development of the necessary security guarantees with America regarding the fate of our part of the world.”
Does Trump lack historical awareness?
Eastern European history shows that what Russia and the US are up to is nothing new. That is also why news reports on similar historic peace agreements abound today, even if they cannot be compared 1:1.
A few days ago, EU foreign affairs and security representative Kaja Kallas called Washington’s approach to early dealings with Moscow on Ukraine a politics of appeasement. History shows this approach has not worked in the past. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated appeasement of the Nazis in the 1938 Munich Agreement, for instance, is often used as a clear example of this.
“I’m not a big fan of sweeping historic analogies,” says Guido Hausmann, a professor of East and Southeast European history at the University of Regensburg, Germany. “But what I see now,” as Hausmann, who is specialized on Russia, the Soviet Union and Ukraine, told DW, “East and Central European nations have often been the plunder of treaties drawn up by major powers… but the US, as far as I can see, is entirely oblivious to this fateful tradition.”
Memories of 1938 Munich Agreement — Munich 2.0?
British historian Timothy Garton Ash used the analogy in a February 14, 2025, piece in Germany’s Zeit Magazin online, writing that the way “Trump is ignoring Ukraine and handing it to Putin like a present” reminded him of the 1938 Munich Agreement to appease Hitler.
“I’m not a fan of the idea that we can or should learn from history because it repeats itself,” historian Martina Winkler told DW. Nevertheless, Winkler, a professor of East European history at Kiel University in Germany, said, “It’s difficult not to think of the 1938 Munich Agreement when observing the current situation.”
The Munich Agreement was signed by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom, the Republic of France and Fascist Italy on the evening of September 29/30, 1938. It agreed that Czechoslovakia — whose government was not consulted — would forfeit the German-speaking Sudetenland to Germany.
“Czechoslovakia wasn’t just robbed of border territory. The country, one of the last democracies in Europe between the wars, was served up to war-mongering Hitler on a silver platter in hopes that it would prevent a war,” explains Winkler. “We all know how that went.”
Trump and Putin — a new Yalta?
The 1945 Yalta Conference has also appeared more frequently in the international press since last week’s Munich Security Conference (MSC). The Yalta Conference was a February meeting between the leaders of the US, UK and Soviet Union — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin — that took place near Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. The three negotiated postwar European order at the conference and defined Eastern Europe’s borders without any affected countries having a say.
“It’s no coincidence that many have referred to the Munich Security Conference as ‘Munich 2.0’ or the ‘new Yalta,'” said Winkler. “That might seem overdramatic but we can see some things remain the same.”
There is a certain tradition to such policies, the historian said, one not unfamiliar to Western Europe — and in which East and Central European nations are insignificant. “Western Europe often saw itself as a bastion of democracy and more than often relegated East and Central European nations to the children’s table — if at all.”
“Now, however, allies from Eastern and Central Europe — which include the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania — are more needed than ever. That must be clearly signaled,” Winkler said.
The current US approach to countries in the region is opening up a lot of old wounds.
Brest-Litovsk Treaty: Ukraine claiming agency
Historian Hausmann doesn’t believe people from Eastern and Central Europe have forgotten how often their fate has been decided for them by others in the past when it comes to political decision making.
“Of course it’s humiliating for Ukraine to be ignored, at least for the moment,” he said.
But he also pointed to a pivotal historical precedent for Ukraine, one that occurred during negotiations over the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was negotiated and signed by the so-called Central Powers — the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires — and Soviet Russia. It ended World War I on the eastern front and redistributed large parts of Eastern Europe.
“Ukrainian politicians traveled to Brest-Litovsk and said ‘nobody is going to talk about our territory, about us, if we aren’t there to talk for ourselves,'” Hausmann said.
Ukraine was nothing more than an object to be traded away until it managed to achieve agency throughout the course of talks and became its own political actor, Hausmann explains.
Looking at the situation now he says, “political momentum and the opportunity it can provide means Ukraine still has a chance.”
This article was published in German and translated by Jon Shelton
