Chris

Putin has no intention of stopping. He’s out on a limb, having declared the annnexation of 4 entire oblasts of Ukraine into mother Russia, which includes vast swathes of land he does not control and has no prospect of controlling in the near future. He needs the war to go on and he needs Ukraine to be starved of resources. Putin will continue to play Trump like a fiddle while he attempts to achieve that end.

The one thing he can’t control is the growing awareness within Europe of the need for a credible security architecture without American involvement. Agent Krasnov let Putin down with that little pantomime with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office because, coming right after Macron and Starmer did their damndest to get Trump onside, it left Europe with no credible way to believe that things might not be as bad as they’d been told. They are worse, and even Germany is adjusting its debt rules to allow itself to buy more arms.

The danger for Putin is that this willingness to rearm and to contemplate a non-Nato security plan against Russia might be generating a coalition of the willing, in which states that are willing to - UK, France, Germany, the Baltics, Poland - are more than powerful enough to press ahead outside of organising bodies like the EU or Nato which Russia has effectively compromised by gaining influence within certain member states (Hungary principally, though he’s working on Romania).