with CHARLIE HARPER

As the world anxiously waits for US president Donald Trump to wake up and smell the coffee to accept reality on Russia and its implacable president Vladimir Putin, a European leader heretofore mostly hidden off stage has emerged as a potential saviour.

It’s the president of Finland. More on him in a bit.

Fewer and fewer commentators and pundits still cling to the belief that Trump is somehow playing a sophisticated game of cat and mouse with world public opinion, that this president fully realises that Putin really represents an existential menace to Western civilisation, and that he has a plan to deal with Russia and its relentlessly expansionist plans.

Even some Fox News commentators have switched off the Jeffrey Epstein story and its ominous implications for Trump, who many still believe is somehow inextricably wound up in this sordid scandal of sexual predation and sickening conspiracy.

Maybe that is Trump’s sly agenda: Dominate the headlines as only he is able to do with his seemingly mindless flirtation with Putin and the truly scary prospect of a Russian triumph on the battlefields of Ukraine, toying with Western fears while diverting attention at home away from the stubborn Epstein scandal.

Actually, if this is Trump’s intention, it might be working. The headlines this week and last week have largely forgotten Epstein and the series of never forgotten photos of Trump, then-girlfriend Melania, Epstein and his own long-time girlfriend and convicted enabler Ghislaine Maxwell.

Instead, the Western world hangs on every petulant, peevish, puerile utterance from Trump, hopeful that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskky, the world’s plucky hero in almost every household outside the White House, doesn’t somehow offend his American counterpart and send us all down another hole of despair as we all wait for Trump to finally realize that the only way to avert further damage and depression is to actively resume American support for Kyiv and push Putin’s patched-up army back and compel the Russians to themselves petition for peace.

European leaders flocked to join Zelensky at the White House on Monday after last week’s ignoble Trump-Putin “summit meeting” in Alaska. The UK, France, Germany and Italy were all front and centre at the White House, uttering cautious and prudent praise for Trump as they earnestly sought to nudge the American away from the perilous ledge above the abyss of active complicity with the Russian villain.

It did make for compelling drama. And as the hopeful conclave broke up earlier this week, a figure emerged on the stage as the latest protagonist to offer hope in an increasingly desperate effort to rescue the world from Trump’s stubborn vanity and conceit.

Largely unknown and unrecognised by TV and internet pundits until now, Finnish president Alexander Stubb took centre stage in reporting to the massed media on events in the Oval Office and elsewhere in the White House.

“What we have agreed on is to work on European and American security guarantees, essentially, which will be secure from the European perspective, coordinated with the Americans,” Stubb said. “It’s us who decide what kind of security guarantees we put up for Ukraine, not the Russians.”

In what seemed to be a genuinely spontaneous response to Russia’s immediate rejection of the idea that those security guarantees would potentially include a NATO presence, Stubb came right out and said what we all sense but few other leaders had said, especially on the front porch of the US presidential residence.

“Russia doesn’t decide on that,” Stubb said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Well, yeah. Of course. It really is as simple as that.

And it actually was as simple as that under former US president Joe Biden, who regarded events in Eastern Europe through the same faded lens as Putin himself. The Russian autocrat has managed to move the US and the West back in time to 1945 after World War II. Putin has placed us all 80 years ago, confronting an aggressive and aggrieved Russia that remains fundamentally suspicious of the West.

Finland is a nation that perhaps uniquely understands this resolutely paranoid and hostile Russian bear.

Finland ended decades of carefully managed neutrality and joined NATO in 2023 after Russia seized Crimea nine years earlier while the US slept, and then launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022.

Stubb told reporters that European leaders and Trump agreed Monday that security guarantees for Ukraine were among their top priorities, along with a bilateral meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by a trilateral meeting including Zelensky, Putin and Trump.

Finland has taken great care to stay off the world stage since the end of World War II. The eastern outpost of the West on the Baltic Sea, this wintry nation has suffered like Poland in its geographic position. Along the nation’s 800-mile eastern frontier lies Russia. But instead of Germany on the west, Finland has faced Sweden, long steadfastly demilitarized and neutral but home to an aggressive empire until the Napoleonic era in Europe.

That empire, spanning much of the Middle Ages, included most of what is now Finland. Then after the Russians managed to help defeat Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, Finland became a province of Russia until the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution of 1917 that brought Vladimir Lenin to power in the Kremlin and ended the Tsarist monarchy in Russia.

Finland has been independent since then, though it struggled for its freedom during a frightening Winter War with the Soviet Union in 1940-1 and became a practical ally of Nazi Germany during the latter stages of World War II. Then the Finns for nearly eighty years concluded that they could best deflect Soviet and Russian territorial greed by remaining steadfastly neutral during the Cold War and afterwards.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago changed all that. Finland and Sweden moved quickly to join NATO, completing Russia’s European isolation and stiffening Putin’s resolve to buffer his country’s western borders.

According to press reports, after the meetings with Trump, the Finnish president described his country as a regional “security provider”, noting its mandatory military service, large reserve forces and arsenal of weapons. “We have over 60 F-18s. We just bought 64 F-35s. We have long-range missiles, air, land and sea, and we have the largest artillery in Europe, together with Poland,” Stubb said.

Finland and other European countries represented at the White House on Monday are part of a group known as the Coalition of the Willing, which also met virtually on Tuesday. Stubb said they have been working for several months on how to help secure Ukraine and decided at the White House meeting to order their militaries and civil servants to come up with a plan as soon as next week.

The location for a potential meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy has not yet been determined, but Stubb suggested Switzerland as a possibility. “Geneva could work actually,” he said. “I think that would be neutral territory for it.”

Stubb reportedly solidified his relationship with Trump over a round of golf in Florida in March, when they competed together in a member-guest tournament at Trump’s ‘home’ course. Apparently impressed, Trump gave Stubb a new set of replacement clubs.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump then asked Stubb over lunch if he could trust Putin, and Stubb told him “you cannot trust Putin”. Hours later, the Journal reported, Trump publicly criticized Putin for the first time over his refusal to agree to a cease-fire with Ukraine.

The Journal has also reported on informal calls and texts between the two leaders since then, including Trump sometimes consulting Stubb before speaking with Putin. Zelensky has also publicly thanked Stubb for helping him to rebuild some kind of relationship with Trump after Zelensky’s infamous, angry exchanges with the president and JD Vance at their White House meeting in February.

There is also speculation that Stubb has figured out how to make Trump see the significance and extent of Putin’s prospective seizure of Ukrainian territory.

“For an American audience,” Stubb told NBC News, “the best way to explain it is that if you take the relative land mass of what Russia wants right now from Ukraine, it would be a little bit like you giving up Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, even Virginia, and then bumping into Maryland.”