Walking around the Italian garden in the Livadia Palace in Yalta last weekend, I could not help but feel the weight of history. It was here that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill were photographed in February 1945 as they worked out who got what at the end of the second world war.

These days Yalta continues to make history, albeit with fewer far-reaching consequences. The annual Yalta European Strategy Meeting, a sort of mini Davos with better architecture, is hosted here by businessman and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. The Ukrainian billionaire founded the event in 2004, when he persuaded 30 people to come together to discuss and plan Ukraine's best approach to joining the EU. These days the meeting is quite a bit bigger.

I first met Pinchuk when he rescued me from the side of the road after I broke my arm in Davos last year. But I confess that until I boarded my flight to Kiev last week, I had not even looked up the country in an atlas. I can neither speak nor read a word of Ukrainian. I realise that most middle-aged residents of South Oxfordshire probably don't either - but then they were not trying to navigate their way round Yalta by foot. At night.