HIS: This Day in History: 1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

 HIS: This Day in History: 1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Its clauses provided a written guarantee of peace by each party towards the other and a commitment that declared that neither government would ally itself to or aid an enemy of the other. In addition to the publicly-announced stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included the Secret Protocol, which defined the borders of Soviet and German spheres of influence across Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. The secret protocol also recognised the interest of Lithuania in the Vilno region, and Germany declared its complete disinterest in Bessarabia. The rumour of the existence of the Secret Protocol was proved only when it was made public during the Nuremberg Trials.

Soon after the pact, Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September, one day after a Soviet–Japanese ceasefire came into effect after the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. After the invasions, the new border between the two countries was confirmed by the supplementary protocol of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty. In March 1940, parts of the Karelia and Salla regions, in Finland, were annexed by the Soviet Union after the Winter War. That was followed by the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania (Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertza region). Concern for ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians had been used as pretexts for the Soviets' invasion of Poland. Stalin's invasion of Bukovina in 1940 violated the pact since it went beyond the Soviet sphere of influence that had been agreed with the Axis.

The territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union after the 1939 Soviet invasion east of the Curzon line remained in the Soviet Union after the war ended and are now in Ukraine and Belarus. The Vilno region, which was once Polish, is now part of Lithuania, and the city of Vilnius is now the Lithuanian capital. Only the region around Białystok and a small part of Galicia east of the San River, around Przemyśl, were returned to Poland. Of all the other territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 to 1940, those detached from Finland (Western Karelia, Petsamo), Estonia (Estonian Ingria and Petseri County) and Latvia (Abrene) remain part of Russia, the successor state to the Russian SSR after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The territories annexed from Romania had also been integrated into the Soviet Union (as the Moldavian SSR or oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR). The core of Bessarabia now forms Moldova. The northern part of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Hertza now form the Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine. Southern Bessarabia is part of the Odessa Oblast, which is also in Ukraine.

The pact was terminated on 22 June 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, which also executed the ideological goal of Lebensraum. After the war, Ribbentrop was convicted of war crimes and executed. Molotov died at 96 in 1986, five years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Soon after World War II, the German copy of the Secret Protocol was found in the German archives and published in the West. However, the Soviet government denied its existence until 1989, when it finally acknowledged and denounced the Secret Protocol, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, condemned the pact and admitted its existence. Vladimir Putin condemned the pact as "immoral" but also defended it as a "necessary evil". At a press conference on 19 December 2019, Putin went further and announced that the signing of the pact was no worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement, which led to the partition of Czechoslovakia.

#Hirobuchi.