If one is looking for high-level meetings to blame for the Cold War-era division of Europe, then Moscow and Potsdam come to the fore, not Yalta. It was in Moscow that Churchill and Stalin agreed to divide the Balkans in October 1944, while in Potsdam, at the prompting of James Byrnes, the new American president accepted the deal that divided Germany into distinct zones of occupation and offered Western recognition to Stalin’s puppet governments in Eastern Europe. At Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill approved the establishment of a Soviet sphere of influence in northeastern China, but it was only in Potsdam that America and Britain tacitly accepted Stalin’s control of Eastern Europe.

—Serhii Plokhy, Yalta, (London: Penguin, 2010), Epilogue.