Comment to the article Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin, review — a different way to look at WWII by Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times, 21 March 2021.
‘[WWII] didn’t begin in September 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, but eight years earlier with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. It didn’t end in the summer of 1945, but dragged on until the autumn of 1989, when the Soviet empire finally broke up.’
Nazi Germany and Communist Russia jointly invaded Poland in September 1939, slight delay on the Russian side notwithstanding. 1989 is not the end of WWII. 1989 is significant mainly as the date of West’s crucial defeat on the cognitive battlefield.
Also, no one here seems to be concerned that the Yalta deal, signed by Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin in 1945 was an illegal one.
@LechSBorkowski