Keir Starmer, you claim huge and damaging cuts are vital so we can buy arms and defend ourselves. Prove it | Owen Jones

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Britain is now on a “war footing”, we are told. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, demanded that European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or … Read more

Be grateful you’re still here: Germany’s rebuke of a grieving mother exposes its deepening anti-immigrant mood | Fatma Aydemir

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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

The Guardian view on the US suspension of military aid: Ukraine and Europe’s race against time | Editorial

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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

Even after the White House ambush and now Trump’s military pause, Ukrainians are defiant, but want a path to peace | Nataliya Gumenyuk

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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

Yes, Trump is a hypocrite. But is pointing that out an effective attack? | Jan-Werner Müller

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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

Putin is not Hitler. His actions in Ukraine are horrific enough to need no exaggeration | Simon Jenkins

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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

JD Vance’s traumatic past doesn’t explain his bullying of Ukraine: his ‘might is right’ doctrine does | Karolina Wigura and Jarosław Kuisz

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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