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The first time I went to Hanau, I was creeped out by how ordinary it was. This mid-sized city of 100,000 people right in the geographical centre of Germany, looked and felt like many other places in western Germany I had been to: built around a bombed and reconstructed old town, expanded by a soulless … Read more

In the Four Quartets TS Eliot wrote “humankind cannot bear very much reality”. At moments in history like these, when there is simply too much head-spinning change and too many postwar assumptions being ripped from their moorings, it sometimes appears too much for any human to absorb, let alone offer a response. In particular in … Read more

How long do Ukraine and Europe have to respond to US betrayal? When Russia launched its full-scale invasion three years ago, each day that Kyiv held out was a victory. The west rallied to Ukraine’s support at equally remarkable speed. Now, as the Trump administration turns upon the victim, and embraces the aggressor, Europe is accelerating … Read more

For Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this is no time to grovel. After last Friday’s ambush in the Oval Office – where the Ukrainian president, who has led his country in resistance to three years of brutal Russian aggression, was beaten up in public by Donald Trump and JD Vance – some European leaders, including Keir Starmer and … Read more

A few days before the Munich Security Conference, one of the Ukrainian military officers fighting on the eastern Ukrainian border told me about intercepts of the Russian army talks their unit had obtained. Russian middle-level commanders were instructing their subordinates to hold on for a bit as “with Donald Trump in the office”, their “goals … Read more

Historians and psychologists will study when exactly the meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy started to descend into political disaster. A plausible contender for an answer is the – in itself trivial – moment when Brian Glenn, representative of far-right outlet Real America’s Voice (newly admitted to the press pool) asked the Ukrainian president … Read more

Is Vladimir Putin another Adolf Hitler? The western world seems to think so. In which case is Donald Trump another Neville Chamberlain and Ukraine another Czechoslovakia? Is history bunk, or is it a wise old man leaning on the gate as Europe storms into its latest crisis? Godwin’s law holds that the longer a political … Read more

Even before the shocking treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the US had voted with Russia in the UN. Alarm bells about the security threat now facing Europe were already ringing during JD Vance’s speech in Munich in February, when he questioned the point of defending Europe’s liberal democracies from Russia. For the … Read more

It’s not only about Donald Trump. It’s not just about saving Ukraine, or defeating Russia, or how to boost Europe’s security, or what to do about an America gone rogue. It’s about a world turned upside down – a dark, fretful, more dangerous place where treaties and laws are no longer respected, alliances are broken, … Read more

After last Friday’s disgraceful roughhouse treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, delivered a pithy summary of first principles regarding the first full-scale war between nation states on European soil since 1945. “There is an aggressor: Russia,” Mr Macron observed on social media, “There is a victim: Ukraine. We were … Read more