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........

© The Sydney Morning Herald