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While Donald Trump talks of the “big beautiful ocean” separating the US from the war in Ukraine, 1,000 miles 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’
There was a sense of quiet satisfaction in the Ministry of Defence’s main building on Whitehall when, during one of his unpredictable press huddles in the Oval Office last week, Donald Trump said he was pleased that Nato was “stepping up”. It is a phrase that the British defence secretary, John Healey, had been pushing as part of Britain’s effort to keep Washington engaged. Now it was being echoed in the White House.
The first person Healey called after the announcement that the UK would increase its spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP by April 2027 was his US counterpart, Pete Hegseth. In the six weeks the American has been in office, Healey has spoken to him four times, twice in person. Meanwhile, at 6pm every Tuesday evening, Britain’s defence secretary rings his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov. “It’s very clear that a precondition for the US taking European security seriously is Europe showing we are taking our own security seriously,” a Whitehall source said.
Few would dispute that Keir Starmer and Healey have been pulling all the diplomatic levers at their disposal. Richard Shirreff, formerly a British general and previously Nato’s European deputy supreme allied commander, believes “the prime minister is still trying to be a bridge between Trump and Nato” and if the US is up for that “then fantastic”.
“But from a purely security perspective, I think we have to accept that Europe and Canada have got to stand on their own without America,” he says. “We’ve got to get real. America has not just drifted away. It’s cut itself off. Anybody who thinks that America is still committed to Nato is … I don’t know what they’re smoking.
“You have to assume that the American security guarantee for Europe has gone. We are in a new world. The French have been absolutely right about strategic autonomy, and the British line that America ‘will always be the leader of Nato’ has been proved completely wrong.”
He adds: “The only way that we are going to avoid catastrophe in Europe is through effective deterrence and to deter effectively means you have to be ready for the worst case.
“The worst case is war with Russia, and this means that we have to look to not just increasing the size and capability of our armed forces, we have to build societal resilience.
“We have to look at home defence. We have to look at civil defence, and we have to look to the mobilisation of industries, building up a war economy – the whole nine yards.”
Brussels, Belgium: ‘War councils’
The timetable for the Eurostar services from London St Pancras to Brussels once defined the parameters of the working day for Georg Riekeles, as an EU official dealing with British Brexit negotiators.
Riekeles, a Norwegian, has worked in the Brussels institutions for about 15 years, most recently as a diplomatic adviser to Michel Barnier. Today, nursing a small Vedett beer in Le Coin du Diable bar in the shadow of the European Commission’s towering headquarters, he is taking a break from his work for the European Policy Centre thinktank. “It’s no overstatement to say that European countries are facing the most dire situation they have faced since the end of the second world war,” he says.
Some of the barricades that fortified the EU quarter during a summit of leaders are yet to be removed but the circus has moved on. EU leaders agreed to “become more sovereign [and] more responsible for its own defence”. They endorsed a decision to open up €150bn (£125bn) in loans for European defence spending, and to relax the rules on spending and debt rules to allow Europe to potentially raise a further €650bn over the next four years for arms.
After years of France vainly banging the drum for strategic autonomy from the US, European leaders’ hands have been forced by Trump’s suspension of military aid and intelligence support to Ukraine, now reinstated, the start of bilateral peace talks with Vladimir Putin and the imminent attack on European businesses through import tariffs.
The summit should be seen as the first of a series of European “war councils”, Riekeles says. He predicts that financial and military support for Ukraine will ratchet up as forms of hard security arrangements less dependent on the US are being worked out. But “this is not a system where you can just push a button”.
It is in the “European DNA” to “want to think that the world is globalising, that a more open world and interdependence is a condition for security, rather than dependencies or interdependencies being at risk of creating a security risk”, says Riekeles.
The reality is that it will take a little time to respond to the “new world”, he says. “Think of Germany, I mean, they decided to rely on Russia for their energy, for China for trade and the US for security,” says Riekeles. “All three of them are gone.”
Frankfurt, Germany: ‘A dysfunctional country’
As the high-speed train from Brussels Midi to Frankfurt enters Aachen station, on the Belgian-German border, two officers in the black uniform of the polizei spot something and start to run along the platform. They board the train and zero in on a black man halfway down coach 23. “Where is your ID card?” they demand of the man in English, after he fails to understand their German. He duly offers his passport. His papers are in order. They move on. “Always the same,” says Dr Oliver Gnad, who runs the Bureau of Current Affairs thinktank in Frankfurt. “It feels super uncomfortable. It starts to become a racist system.”
In 2022, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that more people of sub-Saharan African heritage were stopped by police in Germany (33%) than in any other European country apart from Austria (40%) in the previous five-year period.
Immigrants and asylum seekers have become a target for politicians seeking to assuage the anger of those at the rough end of Germany’s ailing economy and failing infrastructure, as epitomised by a much-maligned rail network.
After the most recent election, Germany’s chancellor in waiting, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, announced a plan to make constitutional amendments to unleash up to €1tn in defence and infrastructure spending. “Germany is back,” he said.
Merz has a small window to push the plan through before the new Bundestag is convened on 25 March with its blocking group of the far-right, pro-Kremlin Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Left party.
Prof Matthias Moosdorf, a cellist by profession with a hairstyle worthy of the pop star Leo Sayer in his pomp, is the AfD’s foreign policy spokesperson in the Bundestag.
The MP says he joined the party after being ostracised for his belief that Germany had a problem of “other cultures not related to our culture”. “My colleagues from the music world said, ‘OK, you are now engaged with this Nazi party, and we don’t allow you to give any concert any more’,” he says.
Moosdorf believes Vladimir Putin does not pose a threat to Germany and that the rush to change the constitution to increase spending was “anti-democratic”.
“We are a dysfunctional country,” he says. “We have all the migration problems. We have all the problems with deindustrialisation. It doesn’t make any sense for the biggest country like Russia to risk a war against Nato, against Germany. This is completely nonsense.”
The AfD became Germany’s second largest party after winning 20.8% of the vote in the election, and is by far the dominant force in east Germany.
“If they [the government] don’t deliver on my cost of living, if they don’t deliver on ‘I feel threatened by mass immigration and we don’t integrate them’, then I think the AfD is going to rise to probably the biggest party in the next elections,” says Gnad, who was forced to work from home today because of a transport strike.
One of his friends is Ben Hodges, who was the commanding general of the United States army Europe until his retirement in 2018. He lives in Frankfurt with his German-American wife.
“This is anything but a peace plan, it is a surrender,” says Hodges, 66, of Trump’s recent intervention.
“I think it’s pathetic that Europe has taken so long to get its act together and combine its economies to challenge Russia,” he adds. “You could shut down Russia economically, if you were serious about it. But I’m afraid there’s too many countries in Europe are still benefiting from Russian crime.”
Vienna, Austria: Trying to float above world events
The distinctive gondolas of the Wiener Riesenrad, the grand ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater park, appear unchanged since they featured in the film noir classic The Third Man. The film’s director, Carol Reed, and author, Graham Greene, explored the moral ambiguity of postwar Vienna and the immanent good and evil of mankind.
There is no shortage of ambiguity in Austria’s approach to Ukraine. Agreement on a new centrist coalition government was reached a few weeks ago, and while Austria has been a neutral state since the second world war, it has affirmed its support for Ukrainian sovereignty. Yet Austria was within a whisker of having its first far-right-led government since 1945, and one that is openly pro-Kremlin. The Freedom party (FPÖ) won the largest share of the vote in the recent election with 28.85% of votes cast. Coalition talks fell by the wayside over the party’s demands for control over the interior ministry, among other issues.
Austria would have probably joined Hungary and Slovakia as potential blocks on EU efforts to support Ukraine. The FPÖ’s leader, and the country’s prospective chancellor, Herbert Kickl, has spoken of the “long history of provocations, including by the US and Nato”.
It offers a worrying portent of what could happen in Germany, suggests Marcus How, the head analyst at VE Insight, an investment risk adviser. “Politically, it’s always been a bit of a kind of canary in the coalmine,” he says.
Sipping on a glass of apple juice in Cafe Landtmann, a favourite of Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hofer, a former journalist who reported on the FPÖ and now runs a political consultancy, says there is a tendency, exhibited in varying degrees by a lot of Europeans, for Austrians to believe they can float above world events. “Don’t you feel all right? Isn’t it nice? Isn’t it comfortable?” he says.
Kraków, Poland: Distressing time for pro-Atlantic generation
It has been a tense few weeks at the Polonia wax museum (“So bad, it’s good” was a recent review) a short walk from Kraków’s central station. They were not sure whether to save their money for a new pope, when the sculptures cost up to €12,000 each. Following reassuring news about the health of the pope from the Vatican, the owner, Marian Dreszer, opted to update his models of Trump, Volodymr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader has been on display in the basement in a jail cell due to incidences of him being spat upon and punched by visitors. The three men will be put around a negotiating table, says Dreszer. “But maybe Trump will be spat at too now,” says his son Maciej.
It has been a particularly distressing time for Poles of a certain age as the Trump administration reveals its seeming indifference to European security, says Dr Natasza Styczyńska, an associate professor at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University.
“It’s a huge disappointment especially for the traditionally pro-Atlantic generation, people who still remember communism, for whom America was always the embodiment of democracy, freedom, minority rights, you know, all of these things we didn’t have,” she says. “For this generation this is a shock.”
There is, however, near unanimity that part of the response must be to ramp up defence spending.
Poland will spend an expected 4.7% of GDP on defence this year, the highest among the Europeans in Nato. The prime minister, Donald Tusk, has spoken of the potential for Poland to acquire a nuclear deterrent. He has further proposed more than doubling Poland’s army to 500,000 troops and establishing compulsory military training for all adult men by the end of the year.
But all this has a cost. And in Kraków’s city hall, Aleksander Miszalski, a mayor with ambitions to revitalise the transport system and open new parks, says money is tight. A debate is raging about how to find cash at all levels of government. “Inflation and rising cost of salaries and energy are big problems,” he says.
Next month Miszalski, 44, who is a political ally of Tusk’s and regional chair of his Civic Platform party, will travel to Warsaw for a meeting about civil defence – and building bunkers. “We’ve got like 5% of what we need,” he says. “We have a lot of them but very small. In hotels, old bunkers, small bunkers. We need to hide 1 million people in case of something … You have to change what you have been thinking about for the last decades.”
Przemyśl, Poland: “It’s unpredictable because of the blond-hair guy”
The grand, white-stone railway station at Przemyśl, close to the Polish-Ukrainian border, has been a first port of call for hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in Ukraine. What was a deluge is now a trickle but the numbers being taken in at the Hope Foundation refugee centre, a place for short-term stays, tend to swell when Russian strikes are at their heaviest.
They are looking after just 15 people at the moment – and that is just as well. Their funders’ promise of a new furnace was killed off by Trump’s decision to end USAid support in Ukraine. The online psychological support provided by a Greek NGO was also terminated as a result of the White House decision. “The impact was immediate,” says a local volunteer, Jacek Wiarski. “It’s unpredictable because of the blond-hair guy.”
Maryna Drasbaieva, 21, who has been in the centre for nearly a year after escaping Kherson, the partially occupied region of south Ukraine, was a trainee baker at home and delights the other residents with her pancakes. She shakes her head, and looks away when asked whether Trump could bring peace. “I hate politics,” she says. “There was too much dying at home. My mum needs an operation. We want to go to Germany.”
It has not been easy to keep the centre going, with some local resentment bubbling up in the last two years at the 1 million Ukrainian refugees in the country. A recent posting on social media asking for donations received a depressing response, says Wiarski. “They write, ‘Why do you want to support them?’” he says. “‘Why are they getting our money from the social security?’”
Lviv, Ukraine: ‘You’re either with Ukraine or you’re with Russia’
It is the start of spring in western Europe but as the train passes through Medyka, the border crossing between Poland and Ukraine, the sky is sleet-grey and there is heavy snow.
In the train’s second carriage, Anastasia Krapyva is returning to Kyiv to see her family. She left Ukraine in 2023 for Germany, where she works in a laundry, and admits to having mixed feelings about coming home. It scares her a bit.
“It’s no good,” she says. “What Donald Trump is doing is not good for Ukraine. It might be good for Russia but not Ukraine.”
During a visit to the Unbroken national rehabilitation centre in Lviv, Serhiy Kiral, the city’s deputy mayor, who also has a responsibility for international cooperation and visited Washington in that capacity shortly before the presidential inauguration, is no less despairing of the American approach.
He quotes Henry Kissinger: “To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”
“What will the Americans decide?” asks Kiral. “Are they going to side with Putin again? I think at some point, if that continues, we’ll probably have to say ‘enough is enough. You know, you’re either with Ukraine or you are with Russia.”
He believes Europe can fill the gaps left by the US. “What is the alternative?” he asks.
Illia Dmytryshyn, 26, is a paratrooper who took a bullet to his thigh in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, and watched as a friend trying to rescue him was blown in half by a drone.
“We’ve already lost so much,” he says. “If the Europeans do step in and start helping more, that would definitely help. But even if they don’t, we are still going to keep fighting and defending our land to the last metre.”
