There are fears that Europe is exhausted with the war, worries about Trump’s logic but some hope of a silver lining
In the Benedikt cafe in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, one wall is covered by a giant map with countries and territories cut out of lacquered wooden pieces, with Greenland at its apex.
The waiter has not been following news of the Greenland crisis and Donald Trump’s desire to annex the Danish territory. But the echoes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin’s imperial land grab of the waiter’s own country are clear to him. “They’re crazy. The pair of them.”
For those paying more attention in Ukraine, amid Russian airstrikes, the freezing cold and power cuts, the correspondences are not only clear, but often alarming – even if for now Trump has switched from sabre rattling to trying to rationalise a vague and incoherent deal he thinks he struck for the territory with Nato.
“There are three basic problems,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on foreign policy and inter-parliamentary relations and an expert on international law.
