When was the last major successful "land grab"? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Define "successful" and "major".

The international community in the post-WWII era has looked very skeptically at territorial acquisition through military force. Oftentimes, as in Northern Cyprus or Nagorno-Karabakh, territories "grabbed" weren't even annexed, but made unrecognized states with military support and close diplomatic ties with the power which created them. Situations like Morocco's annexation of most of Western Sahara or Israel's of the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem are recognized by virtually no other states and have caused the grabbers no shortage of diplomatic issues or resistance from the people living there - but they've also remained stable for decades. Going back further there are a bunch of situations (Indonesia and West New Guinea/Irian Jaya, India and Hyderabad, or Goa, or Sikkim) where what might be called a land grab was tied up deeply with decolonization and met little international resistance - but the international community had never recognized the target state's right to independence in the first place, or it was seen as reunification and not a land grab. The Soviet conquest of Karelia and the Baltic States is how far back you need to go for an unambiguous successful example, but it's less a hard line and more a gradual scale on what's acceptable as a means of producing territorial changes, and what constitutes territorial changes, and I can't go further without more detail of what you mean.