The week Europe realised it stands alone against Russian expansionism

Washington’s Putin-appeasing plan for peace in Ukraine has failed, but many heard death knell sounded for European reliance on US protectionKaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, asked her officials this week to dig up the number of times Russia had – in its various guises – invaded other states in the 20th and 21st centuries. The answer that came back was 19 states, on 33 occasions. Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister, was not just indulging in some form of historical mathematics. She was seeking to make a point that lies at the heart of the dispute between the US and Europe over Ukraine’s future, a dispute that has again revealed the chasm across the Atlantic about the true nature of the Russian regime.Kallas reads history books as a leisure activity and – drawing on her own country’s history of Soviet occupation – has long maintained that the Soviet