Anne Applebaum

What does that mean for Ukraine going forward and so on?

The EU security services inside governments, people are beginning to ask what alternative plans there are.

There's another weird thing, which is that while all this is happening, the US military and NATO country militaries remain as integrated as they ever were.

And U.S.

intelligence works closely with European intelligence in many areas.

I don't know that there are military exercises going on right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were or if there were some that were scheduled for next month, and those will probably happen.

So all of the stuff that allies do together, like on a sort of one level down from the politics, is still happening.

And there are these deep relationships, as I said, between military, between strategy, between intelligence.

institutions and people all across what we call would call the transatlantic alliance all that still happens and so i think that's part of what gives people this feeling of surreality i mean you know we still like americans we work with them you know we we trade with them i mean the danes have all these huge companies that sell weight loss drugs and shipping um

Windmills, I think.

And they have enormous trade relationships and lots of tourists.

And so, you know, simultaneously, while they hear this, this very aggressive stuff coming from the president and some of the people around him, they don't see it in reality.

And that's that's also part of the Kafkaesque atmosphere of the moment.

So the one thing that has happened this week that is important for Ukraine is that a piece of the negotiation is about so-called security guarantees.

I'm a little wary about all this anyway, kind of dubious, but...

Part of the negotiation is that if the war were to end, Ukraine would need some kind of conviction that it wasn't going to start again the next day.

So if people were to come back and if they're to rebuild the country and people are going to invest, then there has to be some security after the war.

And so towards that end, actually, the British and the French in the last few days have said they would lend troops to Ukraine.

And I don't know the full details.

The United States has made some noises about security guarantees.