The percentages agreement was a secret informal agreement between British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944. It gave the percentage division of control over Eastern European countries, dividing them into spheres of influence. Franklin Roosevelt was consulted tentatively and conceded to the agreement. The content of the agreement was first made public by Churchill in 1953 in the final volume of his memoir. The US ambassador Averell Harriman, who was supposed to represent Roosevelt in these meetings, was excluded from this discussion.
Churchill's Mediterranean strategy
During the Second World War, Winston Churchill became painfully aware that Britain had spent virtually all of its reserve capital on the war and was becoming economically dependent upon American support. He recognized that the Soviet Union would end up being much stronger than it was before the war, while Britain would be weaker. Fearing that the United States might return to isolationism after the war, leaving an economically-weakened Britain to face the Soviet Union alone, he sought a preemptive agreement with Stalin that might stabilize the post-war world and tie the Soviets down in a way that was favorable to British interests. In this regard, Churchill was especially concerned about securing the Mediterranean within the British sphere of influence, making it clear that he did not want Communists to come to power in Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia as he believed that Communist governments in those countries would allow the Soviet Union to establish air and naval bases in those nations, which would threaten British shipping in the Mediterranean.
The Suez canal and the Mediterranean Sea were key shipping routes between Britain and its colonies in Asia, especially India, together with the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand. It was also the main route that tankers used to carry oil from the Middle East to Britain. Because of the Suez Canal, Churchill and other British officials intended to keep Egypt in the British sphere of influence by continuing a military occupation of Egypt that had begun in 1882, which was envisioned in Britain as being permanent. For Churchill, British control of the Suez canal required British control of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Losing control of either would cancel out the advantage of control of the Suez Canal. Thus, for Churchill, it was critical to ensure that the nations on the Mediterranean sea lanes, like Italy and Greece, were in the British sphere of influence after the war. Inconveniently for Churchill, during the war Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia all had very large and growing Communist parties, and the most effective anti-Axis resistance fighters in those countries were also communist.
Churchill appreciated the fact that the Soviet Union for much of the war was doing the majority of the fighting against Germany. At the same time, he advocated an Anglo-American "Mediterranean strategy" to strike at the supposed "soft underbelly" of the Axis and advance into Eastern Europe, as much to block the Red Army from advancing westward as to win the war. Churchill's "Mediterranean strategy", which he supported for political reasons more than military ones, caused much tension with the Americans, who preferred to fight and defeat the Wehrmacht in north-west Europe. British policy after June 1941 was to support the Soviet Union as a Soviet defeat would free the majority of the Wehrmacht to fight in the west. At the same time, Churchill had hopes that the war would end with the Red Army being more or less still within the 1941 borders of the Soviet Union with the Allies liberating the rest of Europe. Churchill, together with other British leaders, believed that Britain could not afford heavy losses in fighting against the Germans, and the fact that the Red Army was doing the bulk of the fighting, inflicting heavy losses on the Germans while taking even more heavy losses itself, was a source of quiet satisfaction for him.