I'm John Batchel with my good colleague Mary Kissel, Executive Vice President

Stevenson, Incorporated, former senior advisor to the Secretary of State, meeting in London,

the three principles of NATO, Britain, France, and Germany, represented by the leaders of each government. Significant to me,

they're meeting with Mr. Zelensky to say, we support you. We support your hard work to hold

together alliances, the United States, NATO, EU. We are going to follow through on our promises,

one of them being, a major one being,

we will make Ukraine a member of the EU when the war stops.

A major, major deal.

Wow, there are many nations in Europe that would like that promise.

However, we're not going to pay for it. We're going to make

the Russian frozen assets pay for it in some fashion. Okay, there's maybe up to $300 billion to start

to rebuild, but it will take many years to rebuild Ukraine. And it's a puzzle to me, Mary. I cannot

figure. And you've seen the Europeans in the room.

They want protection on the cheap. Where did they get that idea? When did it start? Did you figure it when you

watch them? Well, they got that idea because they enjoy the protection of the U.S. military.

I mean, think of the nuclear umbrella that we extend and the tens of thousands of troops and places like Germany and now Poland and Britain and Italy has multiple American military installations and elsewhere.

So they figured they didn't have to worry about building up their own

capacity, and they spent the money instead on generous welfare benefits, which now they

increasingly cannot afford. And so, you know, I think reality is setting in. And unfortunately,

the political class in many nations in Europe have become so accustomed to placating their voters and not leveling with them about the threat that they face from Moscow, about the unsustainability, unsustainability, rather, of their public finances that they just appease a piece of peas.

And I think, you know, you're going to have to have a crisis, really, to have leaders emerge that fix the problem. I mean, look at how long it took,

for instance, the Argentinian voters to elect someone like Javier Malay, to right-size the public sector

...