Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe with border changes resulting from invasion and military operations of World War II. During World War II, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed several countries effectively handed over by Nazi Germany in the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. [2] Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II.
Latvia followed on 5 October 1939 and Lithuania shortly thereafter, on 10 October 1939. The agreements permitted the Soviet Union to establish military bases on the Baltic states' territory for the duration of the European war [26] and to station 25,000 Soviet soldiers in Estonia, 30,000 in Latvia and 20,000 in Lithuania starting October 1939.
The Soviet Union (USSR) occupied most of the territory of the Baltic states in its 1944 Baltic Offensive during World War II. [1] The Red Army regained control over the three Baltic capitals and encircled retreating Wehrmacht and Latvian forces in the Courland Pocket where they held out until the final German surrender at the end of the war.
Temporary borders created by advancing German and Soviet troops. The border was soon readjusted following diplomatic agreements. Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland (known as the Kresy) and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with ...
The Soviet annexation of some 51.6% of the territory of the Second Polish Republic, [20] where about 13,200,000 people lived in 1939 including Poles and Jews, [21] was an important event in the history of contemporary Ukraine and Belarus, because it brought within Ukrainian and Belarusian SSR new territories inhabited in part by ethnic ...
Final positions of the Western Allied and Soviet armies, May 1945 Allied occupied areas, 15 May 1945, with territory under Allied control on 1 May 1945 in pink and later Allied gain in red The Line of Contact marked the farthest advance of American, British, French, and Soviet armies into German controlled territory at the end of World War II ...
The Soviet occupation zone in Germany (German: Sowjetische Besatzungszone (SBZ) or Ostzone, lit. ' East Zone '; Russian: Советская оккупационная зона Германии, romanized: Sovetskaya okkupatsionnaya zona Germanii) was an area of Germany that was occupied by the Soviet Union as a communist area, established as a result of the Potsdam Agreement on 2 August 1945.