Putin is ready to carve up the world. Trump just handed him the knife

Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on February 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles – me included – who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbour in the United States.

Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Donald Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganise the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance during their explosive meeting in the Oval Office.Credit: Bloomberg

How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.

His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck – with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic states it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six eastern and central European countries and part of Germany – remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.

Last week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.

On the social platform X, on which Dugin has been hyperactive in the past weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted: “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real; German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine understands the enormity of the threat, not only to his country but to Europe, for which Ukraine has served as a deadly buffer zone. But on Friday, when he tried to talk about this threat during an Oval Office meeting, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance became furious. They yelled at him, demanding that he acknowledge his powerlessness and grovel in gratitude. The talks collapsed.

What happens to Ukraine now? Before Zelensky’s visit to Washington, the best-case scenario was for Russia to agree to a ceasefire in exchange for the roughly 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory it currently occupies. That would leave millions of Ukrainian citizens – those who live in the occupied territories and those who have been displaced east – under the rule of Russian totalitarianism. Now that outcome, which was never likely to begin with, appears all but impossible. We are now in the realm of the worst-case scenario, in which it is possible to imagine Putin launching a renewed offensive against Ukraine, aimed at total domination, this time with the active assistance of the US.

Putin doesn’t just want a return to the 20th century. He already resides there, and that is where anyone looking for what could happen next should turn – specifically to 1938, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who fancied himself a brilliant negotiator and an expert in all things, brokered an agreement that gave Adolf Hitler Sudetenland, an area of Czechoslovakia. In exchange, the rest of Europe would, ostensibly, be safe from German aggression. A year after the resulting Munich Agreement was signed, of course, Germany invaded Poland, and World War II officially began.

When Trump, fuming, threatened Zelensky with the potential for World War III, he may have been drawing a more accurate historical parallel than he realised.

What happens if Russia unleashes its aggression against Europe, unchecked or even aided by the US? The exact contours of the looming catastrophe are impossible to predict. It will not look like the bipolar world of the second half of the 20th century. But just as certainly, it will not look like the world in which we have been living and in which the populations of most of the world’s wealthy countries have felt safe.

I am reminded of reading about the lives of exiles in Paris in the 1930s. German Jews and communists, who had run for their lives, watched as the world reshuffled itself. Political parties that used to be anti-fascist flipped overnight, assuming positions that ranged from appeasement to a full embrace. French and British leaders looked away as Hitler tested his strength outside Germany. As anti-fascism was marginalised, antisemitism became mainstream. Hitler’s victims were blamed for their own misfortune.

Most days now, I touch base with Russian or Belarusian friends in exile who are experiencing a terrifying sort of deja vu. We are perhaps more shocked than our American friends are by the speed with which the very rich and powerful, such as The Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, have become enablers of Trumpism, and how the air itself seems to change until suddenly, it’s Zelensky, with his clear-eyed vision and firm principles, who seems like an anomaly.

We’ve seen it all before, and that is one of the reasons we are shocked. We’ve seen how it ends. Another is that we didn’t expect to see this happen in the US. We thought that our countries were particularly vulnerable to political warping because of their decades-long histories of totalitarianism. “It was nice to know that there was one country where the people in charge were, if not likable, then at least sane,” is how young Russian exile Ksenia Mironova put it. More than that, it was nice to think that the society was sane.

Exiled, but de-funded by Trump: Russian journalist Ksenia Mironova.Credit: Getty Images for FLC

A 26-year-old journalist who was forced to flee Russia in the middle of the night three years ago, her fiance in a prison colony serving a 22-year sentence for high treason, who passed through six countries before finding shelter in New York in a film program, Mironova used to think it was just her bad luck to be born in Russia. Now, increasingly, it looks like this world was an unlucky place to be born into. At the start of her spring semester, Mironova received an email informing her that her funding had been cut off as a result of one of Trump’s executive orders.

Where should she go? Returning to Russia is not an option. If Trump sides with Putin, the US won’t be, either.

“And even Mars is going to be colonised by [Elon] Musk,” Mironova said.

M. Gessen is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and the author of 11 books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017.

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