UKRAINE: MEMORIAL ROOM HONOURING BRITAIN'S WARTIME LEADER SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL OPENS SIXTY YEARS AFTER YALTA CONFERENCE

Record ID: 861262

  • Title: UKRAINE: MEMORIAL ROOM HONOURING BRITAIN'S WARTIME LEADER SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL OPENS SIXTY YEARS AFTER YALTA CONFERENCE
  • Date: 26th February 2004
  • Summary: CHURCHILL'S PHOTO
  • Embargoed: 12th March 2004 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: YALTA, UKRAINE
  • City:
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Topics: History,Quirky,Politics,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
  • Reuters ID: LVA6KDCI0XHC4RFPDBR5EKEOPOKN
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  • Story Text: The Ukraine has honoured Britian's wartime leader Winston Churchill, sixty years after the Yalta conference.
    A room in the Livadia Palace in the Crimean resort of Yalta, where in 1945 Churchill, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. president Franklin D Roosevelt re-drew the map of Europe, has been dedicated to the life and career of the British statesman.
    The memorial room was officially opened on Friday (February 6) at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, where the historic conference of the Big Three - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - took place in February 1945.
    The palace museum, which served formally as a summer residence of Russian tsar Nicholas II, has received a collection of about 60 books, as well as CD Roms, videos and documents to enable visitors to better understand the British leader. A bust of Churchill has also been donated to the collection by his daughter, Mary Soames.
    "It is a great opportunity to remember Churchill who was voted in BBC poll in 2003 as the greatest Britain of all time. And I hope this means that many more people from Ukraine will get to know about Churchill," said Britain's Ambassador to Ukraine Robert Brinkley.
    From February 4-11, 1945, Churchill met with his wartime allies Roosevelt and Stalin in the ornate Livadia Palace in Yalta. It was one of a series of conferences that contributed to the final defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and led to the post-war shape of Europe.
    "It is impossible to minimize the importance of what they did in February 1945, while the war had not finish yet. It does not matter how one views this event through the years."
    At the Yalta talks, the Big Three faced hard decisions on the future of Europe. Nazi Germany was squeezed in an Allied vice but still not defeated. While the armies of the Western Allies had stalled on the River Rhine following the fierce Battle of the Bulge, the Soviets stood on the River Oder, barely 40 miles east of Berlin.
    As Churchill later recalled: "We had the world at our feet, twenty-five million men marching at our orders. We seemed to be friends."
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