“Handed over” is a shorthand. But when you agree to represent your ally and defend his interests at some negotiations, and then betray and abandon him then I think the shorthand expression is entirely correct. You don’t have to have boots on the ground, as you asserted earlier, to hand over a territory. Didn’t we hand over East Germany to the Soviets? And we did have boots on the ground in parts of it! Didn’t we almost hand over Austria?
The Poles and other Eastern Europeans believe that they were abandoned and betrayed by their Western Allies. Are we to tell them that they were not, that in all those negotiations of the four powers their interests were represented and protected?
We did represent them, but only to the point of not going to war. We obtained those “agreements” you referred to regarding free elections. By getting those agreements, I don’t think you can say we abandoned them. The problem still gets back to the one sticking point both you and I recognize: the enforcement of those agreements. There was, short of war with the USSR, no way to enforce those agreements when Stalin broke them.