In the Kremlin on 9 October 1944, Winston Churchill pushed a half-sheet of paper across the table. It proposed 90 percent Russian predominance in Romania and a 90 percent British say in Greece. Josef Stalin ticked it with a blue pencil.
Dr Martin Folly, a historian at Brunel University of London and co-author of a study of Churchill and Stalin, called the percentages agreement a clear cold-blooded bargain. At the same meeting the two leaders agreed to summon Poland’s exiled leaders to Moscow. Folly told Newsweek that Churchill was not above bullying his Polish allies, warning them that a refusal would relieve Britain of further responsibility toward them.
Churchill conceded Romania, where Soviet armies already stood, and secured Greece in exchange. He later wrote that the deal might be thought rather cynical. Professor Richard Toye of the University of Exeter, co-author of a forthcoming book on Churchill and Russia, draws a distinction of motive: Churchill, he said, was acting in relatively good faith.
Newsweek uses that 1944 bargain to test Donald Trump’s handling of Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. On 21 October, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin in St. Petersburg for the ninth time. The piece also cites Trump’s 9 October deal for Russian diesel and his 16 October waiver of most of the sanctions and tariffs imposed on Russia in a bipartisan law he had signed less than a month earlier. The Treasury suspended U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027. The deal promises more than 300,000 tons of diesel at once, which analysts calculate is less than a single day of U.S. consumption. Lawmakers from both parties warn that the sanctions relief will help fund Russia’s war.
Diesel averaged $6.18 a gallon in mid-October, up from $3.48 at the start of the year. Trump calls lower prices for farmers, ranchers and truckers his greatest priority, has told Kyiv to stop striking Russian refineries, and says he finds Volodymyr Zelensky more difficult to deal with than Putin. He announced the diesel deal on the day Ukrainian, British, French, German, EU and NATO officials were meeting his envoys in Florida. Matthias Matthijs of the Council on Foreign Relations said Trump acted without consulting anyone in Europe.
Toye said Churchill stayed convinced until he left office in 1955 that personal, man-to-man meetings were the way to solve big international problems. In Edinburgh in February 1950 Churchill called for a parley at the summit with Moscow. Folly said Churchill, a postwar champion of European unity, would have wanted Europe at such a summit and might have counseled the Ukrainians to weigh the realities of their situation. Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations argues that peace will have to be made with Putin.
Toye said Churchill’s belief in the 1950s was that talking tough, backed by sufficiently credible threats, including nuclear threats, could make Moscow see reason. At Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, Churchill said of the Russians that there was nothing they admire so much as strength. The article’s test is whether the St. Petersburg channel yields a ceasefire that Kyiv and Europe sign, with guarantees that hold through a winter of expected Russian escalation. If sanctions relief buys neither a durable truce nor cheaper diesel by the 3 November midterms, Trump will have spent the strength Churchill thought Moscow respected, with little in return.