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Hello and welcome to a Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Kate Andrews and I'm joined by

the Spectator's political editor, James Forsyth, and the historian Orlando Fijez. Now, James,

about a month ago, if you were looking at Europe, you would have seen countries with very different

perspectives on Russia, real divisions, especially when it comes to

how it might respond through economic sanctions if Russia were to make a move. We now flash

forward about four weeks and Europe has changed and it's changed utterly. Yes, I think it's very

striking that in the kind of premature victory article that was

published on Russian state media. They talk about these splits in Europe between Germany and France

and Britain. This was something that the Kremlin was very satisfied with. They thought there were

these differences in position between Washington and London and Berlin and Paris, and they thought they could

exploit them. Vladimir Putin launching a full-blown invasion of Ukraine has brought the West and Europe

more together, I think, than it has been at any point since in living memory, because if you, I was

going to say 1989, but obviously in 1989, Eastern Europe was still in the Warsaw Pact, forcibly under Soviet control.

And I think if you look now, you see a greater level of unity.

I think you see the change in attitude from the fact that six weeks ago, when the UK first sent lethal aid to Ukraine, they went on this very secure to flight path.

They didn't fly over Germany because the UK didn't dare ask Berlin for permission for fear that Berlin would say no.

You now have Germany sending weapons direct to Ukraine, abandoning Germany's post-war history of not sending weapons into war zones.

You have Olaf Schultz, the German Chancellor, committing to spend 2% of defence on GDP by 2024.

You have overwhelming public support for that in Germany.

You have, you know, in January, two-thirds of a German public wanted to carry on with the

...