Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

It cannot be stated often enough or vociferously enough: The Trump administration is helping Russia to conquer Ukraine. The United States of America has taken the side of an aggressor against its innocent victim. We are helping our actual enemies as they prey upon us and our friends. This policy reversal from both the Biden administration and the first Trump administration is a shameful abandonment of principle and of self-interest.

Today, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre and Finland’s Alexander Stubb called Putin directly, in consultation with Ukraine, ahead of planned talks in Abu Dhabi. Both reaffirmed their support for Kyiv. These are NATO neighbours of Russia whose security depends on what happens next. They were speaking for their own countries, without a mandate to represent Europe as a whole. But the initiative points towards something Europe urgently needs: to conduct its own diplomacy while keeping Ukraine central. Supporting Ukraine and speaking directly to its aggressor are entirely compatible. gandalv.substack.com/p/washi…

Three down. Three left. The people have spoken. We have had enough of the chaos, the hatred, the corruption, and the authoritarian idiots who think the world belongs to them. Orbán, Bolsonaro and Vučić have all been rejected by voters. Today, Netanyahu could be next. And Trump looks increasingly likely to earn his own big red cross in the midterms. That leaves Putin. The rest of us must make sure Moscow gets its red cross too, by giving Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia’s imperial ambitions. The age of «strongmen» is looking a little less strong. And that is a beautiful thing. Remember when you could wake up in the morning without wondering which country was being threatened, which ally had been insulted, or which international crisis had been manufactured overnight by a man with an oversized ego? When politics was often boring, diplomacy happened behind closed doors, and world leaders generally tried to solve problems instead of creating three new ones before breakfast? It wasn’t a perfect world. Far from it. But there was a certain peace in not having to listen to angry old men demanding the world’s attention every single day. Imagine getting that peace back. Imagine a world where the morning news is about progress, discoveries and possibilities, rather than the latest threats, lies and tantrums. We deserve that world again.

Putin, Trump and MAGA love repeating the story that NATO betrayed Russia by expanding eastwards, supposedly breaking a promise never to admit countries once trapped under Soviet communist rule. There is one rather inconvenient detail they always leave out: those countries desperately wanted to join. And with good reason. They remember Soviet occupation, political executions, mass deportations to Siberia, forced collectivisation, prison camps, secret police, censorship and generations of lives destroyed by Moscow’s glorious socialist paradise. Families disappeared. Countries lost their independence. Ordinary people could be imprisoned for expressing the wrong opinion. When communism collapsed, these nations did not need NATO to persuade them to escape Russian influence. They practically ran towards the door. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and the others understood something the MAGA intellectual establishment apparently struggles with: living next to Russia is considerably more pleasant when Russia cannot decide how you live. And that brings us to Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, a leader who spent years cultivating Moscow while balancing Serbia’s European ambitions, has just been defeated by a student-led democratic movement. The celebrations in Belgrade tell their own story. Serbia has its own complicated history, and nobody should pretend this election settles every question about NATO or EU membership. But it exposes the central absurdity of Moscow’s worldview. When a European leader continually argues against Western integration while protecting Russia’s influence, the obvious question is whose interests he actually serves. There is no need to invent secret payments to recognise a politician doing Moscow’s work. NATO did not expand eastwards because Washington forced unwilling nations into an alliance. It expanded because countries with experience of Russian domination wanted protection from ever experiencing it again. Putin, Orban, JD Vance, Hegseth and Trump calls that Western aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has spent centuries discovering that keeping its neighbours within its sphere of influence generally requires threats, repression or an army. That tells you almost everything about which civilisation has something worth offering.

The sheer insanity of American diplomacy under Trump is becoming difficult to comprehend. Steve Witkoff, a New York property developer somehow entrusted with negotiating Europe’s most consequential war since 1945, has just saluted Vladimir Putin as a humanitarian. The man who invaded Ukraine, ordered the destruction of its cities and presides over a state accused of abducting Ukrainian children. Apparently, releasing an American whom Russia wrongfully imprisoned makes Putin a humanitarian. Imagine sending a property salesman to negotiate with a war criminal, only to discover he cannot distinguish between a humanitarian gesture and the man responsible for creating the humanitarian catastrophe. They are so cringe. 😬