Somewhere in eastern Poland, on Sunday 23 February 2025 at about 10.30 at night, we stumbled out of our buses and headed for the train platform. We had been warned strictly against taking any photographs of railway stations, other infrastructure, and soldiers. A wise precaution, but a pity because the scene was like something out of a Cold War movie. The wagons were shrouded in fog, the lights were dimmed, the guards stood at attention on the platform, and there were both police and military personnel visible. Working out the numbers of the carriages was a struggle. Eventually, we boarded and were on our way, heading east, towards Kyiv, the capital of a European country at war.

We were assembling at the invitation of the Pinchuk Foundation to attend a conference marking the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was a real gathering of the clans. The most prominent passenger was former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who did more than anyone else to provide effective support to President Zelensky at the start of the attack. There was Carl Bildt, erstwhile prime minister of Sweden, and stalwart opponent of Putin. But there were also many less well-known figures, who have been giving their all for Ukraine, such as the academic Dr Jade McGlynn, who divides her time between London and the embattled eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

The background to our voyage was sombre. A week earlier, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had warned that Ukraine would neither recover her 2014 borders nor be admitted to NATO. That had been shocking enough, because though his words largely reflected military and political realities, they showed that the United States was prepared to make important concessions, at Ukraine’s expense, even before the start of negotiations. Shortly after, a US delegation met with the Russians in Saudi Arabia to begin to discuss an end to the war, pointedly excluding not only the Europeans but also the Ukrainians themselves.

Then Vice President JD Vance gave that speech to the Munich Security Conference, in which he suggested that Europe’s domestic problems were greater than the threat from Russia. I had witnessed the stunned aftermath as the European national security establishment panicked, and in some cases burst into tears. Shortly afterwards, Trump suggested that the Ukrainians had started the war and that Zelensky was a ‘dictator’.

As we crossed the border, my spirits were not lifted by my reading material. I brought with me my former student Pierre Caquet’s splendid account of the Munich Crisis of 1938, The Bell of Treason: the 1938 Munich Agreement in Czechoslovakia, which I had read when it came out on the 18th anniversary. At that time, famously, the British and French had met with Hitler in Munich without the Czechoslovaks and then handed over a huge chunk of their country to him, rendering the remaining rump defenceless against a takeover that followed hardly six months later. In some ways, I feared, the present situation might be worse. At least Chamberlain had not allied with Hiler, but what appeared to be happening in Saudi Arabia was a great power carve up, more like the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939.

I expected, therefore, to find Kyiv in despair. In fact, the Ukrainians were remarkably phlegmatic. In a series of briefings and panels, they explained the depth and sophistication of their military-industrial mobilisation. Veterans told of the new kind of war being waged by Ukraine in the East, one about which the West has much to learn. But perhaps the most striking contribution came from Roman Shvartzman, Chairman of the Odesa regional association of Jewish former prisoners of the ghetto and Nazi concentration camps. He had not only lost family members to the Holocaust but had also seen his apartment in Odesa hit by a Russian missile in December 2024. ‘Hiter wanted to kill me because I was Jewish’, he explained, ‘Now, Putin is trying to kill me because I am Ukrainian.’

The Europeans, meanwhile, had recovered their nerve. On the day we met in Kyiv, the entire EU Commission arrived in town to show solidarity with Ukraine and especially with President Zelensky. Most of them also turned up at our conference, in three express panels. Each one was pressed to say what specific thing they will do for Ukraine and they all came up with concrete suggestions. Overall, the message was of hope and defiance.

On the train back, though, I was once again overcome by anxiety. News is coming through of the American vote in the UN General Assembly not to specifically condemn Russia. This is depressing, because it suggests a carefully thought-out policy rather than just one of Trump’s impulse actions. Overall, it is not so much the apparent abandonment of the Ukrainians that revolts me, as the bile and contempt shown towards them. And that was before the Oval Office meltdown, when the president and the vice president tried to humiliate Zelensky in front of the cameras of the world but succeeded primarily in embarrassing themselves.

The implications of all this for the wider world are worrying. What the ‘Asia-firsters’ in Washington do not seem to understand is that a failure to support Ukraine will undermine confidence in the US’s ability to guarantee the security of South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. It was therefore no surprise to find a South Korean member of parliament at the Kyiv anniversary conference, arguing passionately in support of further aid for Ukraine. Security has become increasingly indivisible.

Of course, we (the Europeans) have no leg to stand on. We had three years to sort this out, 11 if we take Putin’s 2014 seizure of Crimea as the starting point. At least Chamberlain used the respite won at Munich to build up Britain’s Royal Air Force. The states of the European Union, by contrast, have done very little. In February 2022, as Russia invaded, the head of the German army warned that the equipment cupboard was ‘bare’. Three years on, things are little better.

It is therefore not hard to understand American frustrations that they have contributed the lion’s share of military aid in defence of what is after all our, not their continent. As the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently remarked, it is unreasonable to expect 300 million Americans to protect 500 million Europeans against 140 million Russians. We helped to create Trump, at least in part.

But what have the Ukrainians done to deserve Trump and us? He is no Hitler, to be sure, and probably no Chamberlain, but his treatment of a brave embattled people has been shameful. There is another way in which the 1938 analogy breaks down: the Ukrainians are no Czechs. They have valiantly resisted the Russian onslaught for three years at considerable financial expense to us, certainly, but without costing the life of a single European soldier. Unlike the Afghans, they have stood on their own two feet. We have been lucky in them, I reflected as we crossed the border back into Poland, but they have been unlucky in us.