From February 4 to 11, 1945, three elderly statesmen who would decide the future of Europe after the defeat of Nazism, which was about to occur, met in Yalta, Crimea (USSR). They were the three winners of a war that had turned the entire continent into ruins. And it is quite significant that France was not invited to participate. Be that as it may, it can be said that the Cold War began there and, after being wrongly considered to have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in recent years it has become hot again, increasingly hotter.
It goes without saying that there was a lot at stake, or that, given the circumstances, nor that it was going to be at all easy to reach an agreement satisfactory to the three participating powers. But we had to try no matter what, as Putin, Ursula von der Leyen (if she is re-elected) and… Biden or Trump would now have to try? (This time both the United Kingdom and France would be left out.) Would Zelensky be invited to sit at the table?
If done, would they do it by teleconference? Could it be celebrated without unleashing real storms of fake news? Where would they meet? Would Putin take as much of a cut as Stalin did in 1945? Would it mean the decline of American power in Europe and, therefore, the end of NATO as we know it? In short, there are unknowns for all tastes, which is precisely what gives rise to so many hoaxes and conspiracy theories.
Throughout the Yalta conference, the three leaders and their respective teams drank like Cossacks. The toasts followed one another with unusual rapidity. But many of these details were not known until years later.
In 2013, several secret reports about a visit by Churchill to the Kremlin in 1942 were made public for the first time, in one of which the British undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, describes his boss’s meeting with Stalin and Molotov. . He explains that there was an abundance of food of all kinds and countless bottles of alcohol on the table. Stalin offered the undersecretary a liquor that he described as “wild.” Churchill settled for several glasses of a good Caucasian red wine. “It was all as happy as if it were a wedding party,” concluded the diplomat, but not before stating that the lighthearted and jovial atmosphere helped them reach a historic agreement.
Cardogan also accompanied Churchill to the Yalta conference, where, according to his story, his boss, on this occasion, drank endless glasses of Caucasian champagne. The toasts, very fast and lethal, in the purest Russian style, were enough to kill an ox. Churchill put drink after drink between his chest and back as if it were nothing; Roosevelt, already very ill, limited himself to hiding that he drank them; while Stalin secretly watered down the vodka. This is how the new map of Europe was drawn.
If a new conference were to be held now with similar purposes, it would be strange and even scandalous if drinks other than mineral water and orange juice were to be seen on the business table. Putin and Trump are teetotalers, and it is unlikely that Mrs von der Leyen would ask for a shot of schnapps. But would they reach a deal that would end the war in Ukraine and the growing animosity between Russia and the West?
Adlai Stevenson, US ambassador to the UN during the Cuban missile crisis, said that the life of a diplomat works with only three ingredients; namely: “Protocol, Geritol (a vitamin supplement) and alcohol.” On that occasion, the apocalypse could be avoided. And in this one?
