Yalta and Potsdam: Blueprint and the Fraying of the Grand Alliance

Between February 4 and 11, 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Crimea for the Yalta Conference, where they resolved the main outstanding disagreement over the veto system in the Security Council. They agreed on a formula granting each permanent member the power to block substantive decisions while explicitly excluding purely procedural questions, and they settled the composition of the five permanent members, resolving Soviet requests for multiple seats by granting three — one each for the USSR, Ukraine, and Belarus. The leaders fixed the date and venue for the founding conference in San Francisco, agreed on occupation zones in defeated Germany, and adopted the Declaration on Liberated Europe, which committed the powers to holding free elections in liberated territories — a commitment the Soviets would later fail to honor across much of Eastern Europe. Stalin also committed the Soviet Union to declaring war on Japan within three months of Germany's surrender, in exchange for territorial and influence concessions in East Asia, and the conference shifted Poland's border westward to the Curzon–Oder–Neisse line while recognizing the communist-led Lublin government alongside representatives of the Polish government-in-exile.