Does Europe now stand alone?

While Washington's Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, many have come to realise that the trusting view of Russia held by the US is the diametric opposite to that held in European capitals

- Patrick Wintour

KAJA KALLAS, THE EUROPEAN UNION FOREIGN POLICY CHIEF, asked her officials last week to dig up 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.

Kallas 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's future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about 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 Russian regime means "rewarding aggression will bring more war, not less": Putin will come back for more.

A similar warning was made last 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 told MPS: "We know that without that deterrence, [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 US isolationists. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer currently representing the US on the world stage - but also coaching Russia on how to win over Donald Trump has admitted he knows little history, telling the Atlantic in May that he had been watching some Netflix documentaries to rectify this.