Monument to Big Three Allied leaders of WW2 installed in Crimea

A 10-ton monument to the so-called Big Three of WW2 – Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill – has been installed in the Black Sea Peninsula of Crimea on the 70th anniversary of the Yalta conference.

The monument was unveiled in honour of the key participants of the Yalta conference of Allied powers from the anti-Hitler coalition – the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The ceremony was held in the Livadia Palace that hosted the Yalta conference, the second wartime meeting of the Big Three, on February 4-11, 1945, which laid the foundation for the post-war world order.

The huge statue is the work of the famous Georgian-born sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. The monument has been offered to the Livadia Palace free of charge, a deputy prime minister of the republic, Larisa Opanasyuk, said.

The monument to the Big Three was originally planned to be installed in Livadia on the 60th anniversary of the Yalta conference.

However, some Crimean branches of Ukrainian political parties opposed the move.

The plans to take the monument to central Russia’s Volgograd to mark the 60th anniversary since the Victory in the World War II were halted as local authorities failed to come to an agreement.