Peace talks Can Europe unite to tame Russia without Trump’s help?

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to calculate the number of times Russia had - in its various guises - invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions.

- Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine, a dispute that has again exposed an Atlantic divide over the true nature of the Russian regime.

Kallas has long maintained that the Soviet Union fell, but its imperialism never did. “Russia has never truly had to come to terms with its brutal past or bear the consequences of its actions,” she has said, arguing that the nature of the regime in Moscow means “rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less”: Putin will come back for more.

A similar warning was made this week by the German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, who said: “Our intelligence services are telling us urgently: Russia is at least creating the option of a war against Nato by 2029 at the latest.”

Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has told MPs: “We know that without deterrence, [Vladimir Putin] has the ambition to go again, and he will go again - and we must guard against that.”

All this is diametrically opposite to the view of the US isolationists. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer representing his country on the world stage - but also coaching Russia on how to win over Donald Trump - has admitted he knows little history. He even told the Atlantic magazine in May that he had been watching Netflix documentaries to rectify this.

But based on his four visits to Moscow, he largely treats Russia like any other country, and President Putin like any other world leader. He told the US journalist Tucker Carlson he was 100% sure Russia would not want to take further territory in Europe once it had the four regions in Ukraine it coveted. “There’s this sort of notion of ‘We've all got to be like Winston Churchill - the Russians are gonna march across Europe’ - I think that’s preposterous,” he said.