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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.
Large territories of Polish Second Republic were ceded to the Soviet Union by the Moscow-backed Polish government, and today form part of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Poland was instead given the Free State of Danzig and the German areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse (see Recovered Territories), pending a final peace conference with ...
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 Union appended the annexed territories to the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics. [19] After the end of World War II in Europe, the Soviet Union signed the Polish–Soviet border agreement of August 1945 with the new, internationally recognized Polish Provisional Government of National Unity on
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 ...
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.
Initially, at the end of World War II in 1945, Poland also gained control of the current southern border strip of the Kaliningrad Oblast, with Polish administration organized in the towns of Gierdawy and Iławka, however, the area was eventually annexed by the Soviet Union and included within the Kaliningrad Oblast by December 1945. [129]
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 ...