Rory Stewart

And they've tried it in different ways, haven't they?

They tried it by these endless getting on planes.

They've tried it with documents, with intelligence sharing.

But by now, they should be beginning to realize by November that they fundamentally disagree and that these two different documents show two completely different worldviews.

The first document is the Russian worldview, which says basically Ukraine is really naturally part of Russia, that Ukraine is controlled by corrupt neo-Nazis.

That the whole expansion of NATO since the 1990s has been a provocation against Russia, and that Russia is just defending its own national security interests, that Russia is obviously winning and is a major geostrategic power comparable to the US and China, and that the natural thing to do is to hand over Eastern Ukraine, including bits Russia hasn't got to Russia,

settling the issue because Russia really deserves to dominate that part of the world.

The European point of view is the view that the United States had until the end of Biden, which is this is the most outrageous invasion of a European country, breaking of sovereign borders.

Russia has gone into Ukraine.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed.

almost a million have now been wounded, cities have been destroyed, hundreds of billions of dollars of damage have been done, the international borders have been shifted, Russia is responsible for war crimes, breaking of international law, and that if you care at all about

sovereignty, the United Nations, the democratic world order.

We need to get behind Ukraine, push Russia back.

And if we don't, we're going to face conflict.

And those two views are totally different.

And I'm afraid Trump is very much in the Putin camp.

So the idea that you're going to turn him around by producing, yes, another bit of paper, making exactly the same arguments that you've been making for 11 months isn't going to work.

And now beginning to realize something that we didn't emphasize enough, I think, over the last 11 months.

We've tended to say, look,

There's nothing lost by hoping that Trump is on Europe's side and by going in and being polite to him and flattering him.