From London to Lviv

At each stop on a 1,600km trip, bewildered Europeans are grappling with the unsettling realities of Donald Trump's new world order

-  By Daniel Boffey

WHILE DONALD TRUMP TALKS of the "big beautiful ocean" separating the US from the war in Ukraine, 1,600km of rail track links London St Pancras to the city of Lviv in western Ukraine.

The 19-hour trip takes in Brussels, the German economic powerhouse of Frankfurt, and Vienna, the Austrian capital, before the train rattles into Kraków in south-east Poland and Przemyśl, the Polish border town where the slimmer railway gauges of western Europe meet the wider tracks of Ukraine and Russia to the east.

At each stop, Europeans are grappling in different ways with new and unsettling realities after the US president appeared in recent weeks to herald the end of Pax Americana.

In London, rightly or wrongly, and perhaps out of sheer necessity, the idea of the special relationship remains a comfort blanket. There is a new steely resolve in Brussels but the temptation persists to push decisions back.

A leading German politician described the incoming government in Berlin as "democracy's last bullet" but some worry they will shoot themselves in the foot. Austrians cling to their traditional neutrality as if that alone will keep them safe. In Poland, there is, perhaps, the greatest clarity as to what they think must be done. Yet its polarised political class, traditionally Atlanticist in outlook and discombobulated by the turn in Washington, argues about how to find the money to do it as public opinion wavers over the presence of 1 million Ukrainian refugees. As the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was quoted as saying in 1929: "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters."

London, UK

'Still trying to be a bridge'