How decades of higher welfare spending left Europe at the mercy of Putin

Meanwhile, the focus of the US is drifting away from Ukraine and towards Asia, experts say. An election that could return Donald Trump to power nears in November. The erratic former president has already threatened to take the US out of Nato and said he would “encourage” Putin to attack any member of the alliance failing to spend enough on defence. “That is really making people in Europe think that a year from now Nato defences could be primarily European-led rather than working on the assumption the Americans will always be there when we need them. That is a big change,” says Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute in London.