00:00Trump has postponed this Putin meeting, saying it's a waste of a meeting.
00:03What does that actually say about Washington, their current leverage,
00:06or maybe even their position on that may have changed, or has it remained steadfast?
00:11Yeah, I mean, this is the key question,
00:15because we're waiting for Donald Trump to catch up with European thinking,
00:19to recognise that Putin isn't somebody that you can trust,
00:23that the Kremlin isn't a place that you can do deals with,
00:26that we cannot actually expect Russia to be committed to any long-term ceasefire.
00:34These are the things Europe knows.
00:37But America, or particularly Trump, somehow believes that you could get round the table
00:42and knock heads together and secure a short-term deal.
00:47And you'd hope, slowly, when he came to the NATO summit in The Hague not long ago,
00:53he then said, now I recognise, you know, what Russia is doing.
00:55Let's have those secondary sanctions.
00:57Let's stand up to Putin.
00:59And then he gets a call from Putin, who then manages to somehow persuade him to then row back.
01:05And that's exactly where we were with Budapest.
01:09And I believe now it's time for Europe just to recognise we can't rely on America at the moment.
01:15They are our closest security ally.
01:17And it's not good when America and Europe are not on the same page security-wise,
01:21because adversaries, not just Russia, but China and others take advantage of that.
01:27But if we want to stop Russia's wider geopolitical ambition to alter the lines of Europe's map once again,
01:36then we have to look beyond Ukraine, and we have to invest far more than just in storm-shadowed missiles,
01:41but a wider effort to hold Russia back.
01:45luckERFER
01:49And forum-shadowed
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