A book festival in Vilnius, meetings with friends in Warsaw, a dinner in Berlin: I happened to be at gatherings in three European cities over the past several days, and everywhere I went, everyone wanted to talk about the Oval Office performance last Friday. Europeans needed some time to process these events, not just because of what it told them about the war in Ukraine, but because of what it told them about America, a country they thought they knew well.

In just a few minutes, the behavior of Donald Trump and J. D. Vance created a brand new stereotype for America: Not the quiet American, not the ugly American, but the brutal American. Whatever illusions Europeans ever had about Americans—whatever images lingered from old American movies, the ones where the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and honor defeats treachery—those are shattered. Whatever fond memories remain of the smiling GIs who marched into European cities in 1945, of the speeches that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan made at the Berlin Wall, or of the crowds that once welcomed Barack Obama, those are also fading fast.

Quite apart from their politics, Trump and Vance are rude. They are cruel. They berated and mistreated a guest on camera, and then boasted about it afterwards, as if their ugly behavior achieved some kind of macho “win.” They announced they would halt transfers of military equipment to Ukraine, and hinted at ending sanctions on Russia, the aggressor state. In his speech to Congress last night, Trump once again declared that America would “get” Greenland, which is a part of Denmark—a sign that he intends to run roughshod over other allies too.

[Read: A Greenland plot more cynical than fiction]

These are not the actions of the good guys in old Hollywood movies, but the bad guys. If Reagan was a white-hatted cowboy, Trump and Vance are mafia dons. The chorus of Republican political leaders defending them seems both sinister and surprising to Europeans too. “I never thought Americans would kowtow like that,” one friend told me, marveling.

The Oval Office meeting, the subsequent announcements, and the speech to Congress also clarified something else: Trump, Vance, and many of the people around them now fully inhabit an alternate reality, one composed entirely of things they see and hear in the ether. Part of the Oval Office altercation was provoked by Zelensky’s insistence on telling the truth, as the full video clearly shows. His mistake was to point out that Russia and Ukraine have reached many ceasefires and made many agreements since 2014, and that Vladimir Putin has broken most of them, including during Trump’s first term.

It’s precisely because they remember these broken truces that the Ukrainians keep asking what happens after a ceasefire, what kind of security guarantees will be put in place, how Trump plans to prevent Putin from breaking them once more and, above all, what price the Russians are willing to pay for peace in Ukraine. Will they even give up their claims to territory they don’t control? Will they agree that Ukraine can be a sovereign democracy?

But Trump and Vance are not interested in the truth about the war in Ukraine. Trump seemed angered by the suggestion that Putin might break deals with him, refused to acknowledge that it’s happened before, falsely insisted, again, that the U.S. had given Ukraine $350 billion. Vance—who had refused to meet Zelensky when offered the opportunity before the election last year—told the Ukrainian president that he didn’t need to go to Ukraine to understand what is going on in his country: “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories,” he said, meaning that he has seen the “stories” curated for him by the people he follows on YouTube or X.

Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. This is not new. Back in 2016, at the height of the election campaign, Trump frequently repeated false stories launched by Russia’s Sputnik news agency, declaring that Hillary Clinton and Obama had “founded ISIS,” or that “the Google search engine is suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton.” At the time Trump also imitated Russian talk about Clinton starting World War III, another Russian meme. He produced a new version of that in the Oval Office on Friday. “You’re gambling with World War III. You’re gambling with World War III,” he shouted at Zelensky.

[David Frum: Trump, by any means necessary]

But what was ominous in 2016 is dangerous in 2025, especially in Europe. Russian military aggression is more damaging, Russian sabotage across Europe more frequent, and Russian cyberattacks almost constant. In truth it is Putin, not Zelensky, who started this conflict, Putin who has brought North Korean troops and Iranian drones to Europe, Putin who instructs his propagandists to talk about nuking London, Putin who keeps raising the stakes and scope of the war. Most Europeans live in this reality, not in the fictional world inhabited by Trump, and the contrast is making them think differently about Americans. According to pollsters, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the U.S. is not an ally of France. A majority in Britain and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the U.S. as well.

In reality, the Russians have said nothing in public about leaving Ukrainian territory or stopping the war. In reality, they have spent the last decade building a cult of cruelty at home. Now they have exported that cult not just to Europe, not just to Africa, but to Washington too. This administration abruptly canceled billions of dollars of food aid and health-care programs for the poorest people on the planet, a vicious act that the president and vice president have not acknowledged but millions of people can see. Their use of tariffs as random punishment, not for enemies but for allies, seems not just brutal but inexplicable.

And in the Oval Office Trump and Vance behaved like imperial rulers chastising a subjugated colony, vocalizing the same disgust and disdain that Russian propagandists use when they talk about Ukraine. Europeans know, everyone knows, that if Trump and Vance can talk that way to the president of Ukraine, then they might eventually talk that way to their country’s leader next.

Last year, Russia made slow progress in Ukraine: Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Russian soldiers were killed or wounded, and five whole mechanized divisions were lost, in exchange for Ukrainian territory slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island. At that rate, Russia will control all of Ukraine in about 118 years. Keep that figure in mind when you hear President Donald Trump or Vice President J. D. Vance declare, as Trump did last week at their Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine is “not winning” the war and that it is in “a very bad position.” Russia’s position is also “bad”—and perhaps more agonizing, because Russians taste the extra bitterness that comes with the knowledge that they could, in February 2022, have just stayed home and not started the war. Both sides have lost, which means that declaring only one side the loser is a peculiar choice.

I spoke with two people who have watched the conflict during the past three years to find out which country has time on its side. George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War has analyzed the Russian position and accordingly updated ISW’s map of the state of the conflict. Andrey Liscovich manages a charity, the Ukraine Defense Fund, that has supplied nonlethal aid to Ukraine since 2022, on the theory (borne out during the past year) that the war will be won not by who can produce the most artillery shells but by who can most efficiently outfit their troops with items such as battery packs and radio kits available from Best Buy and RadioShack. He has visited the front lines repeatedly from the Ukrainian side.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Barros told me that to measure recent Russian advances, one must “break out the calipers,” because the war has slowed to the point that both sides are taking and losing just a few square miles of empty land at a time. “[Russia is] not slogging through an urban environment,” he said. “These are largely unpopulated steppes, with a handful of villages and only two operationally significant towns last year. That’s all they have to show for it.” The material cost of this territory of dubious value has been shocking. In one of the main areas of operation in Donetsk, Barros said, Russia “lost about 500 tanks and 1,000 armored personnel carriers—roughly a division for every 10 klicks of movement.” He told me that Russia has recently been observed using pack mules in lieu of mechanized equipment.

The United States military has protocols for the modern use of mules in jungles and in rugged, craggy terrain. To use them in the flatlands of eastern Ukraine suggests desperation. “The Russians have been burning through their Soviet-era stocks,” Barros told me. He said that Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s tank factory, and Tula, its ammunition factory, have been working without breaks since the war broke out. Tanks and other resources can be seen in satellite imagery, and the motor pools full of old ones empty out as they get shipped to the battlefield and obliterated. “Assuming they don’t get a massive vehicle injection from the North Koreans or the Chinese, the Russians are on course to run critically low in the next 12 to 18 months,” Barros said. He noted that Russia has covered storage that could conceal more vehicles. But most signs point to eventual depletion—conditional, of course, on Ukraine continuing to receive military aid at the pace it had been before Trump cut it off this week.

These signs would be more welcome for the Ukrainians if the mode of killing hadn’t shifted in the past year, Liscovich told me. “The war has qualitatively changed since 2022,” he said. In the first month of the conflict, Ukraine became a hunting ground in which Ukrainians armed with Javelin missile systems destroyed Russian armored columns. But then the war became an artillery battle in which each side lobbed shells at the other. The issue that worried Ukraine’s allies was the artillery-shell gap: They were being used faster than factories in Scranton and Germany and Slovakia could replace them. “You used to hear these complaints about not having enough 155-millimeter shells,” Liscovich said. “Now it’s primarily a drone war, and you don’t hear those complaints about shells anymore.”

Most of the frontline kills are now attributable to drones. And Russia can build new drones much faster than it can build tanks. Since the beginning of the war, Liscovich said, Ukraine has had the mother of invention on its side: By necessity, it came up before Russia did with clever new ways to use drones. But Russia then noticed the innovations, developed countermeasures, and deployed drones of its own, using the new capability but at a greater scale than its much smaller enemy. None of this iterative loop of deadly innovation involves tanks. “Heavy equipment gets taken out,” Liscovich told me. “Most of [Russia’s] advances are infantry advances. Drones are harder to use against dispersed, small groups.” The main countermeasure is mortar fire, which is cheap and mobile—again, not a serious constraint that requires around-the-clock shifts in Russian factories.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

The total number of Russians and Ukrainians killed in the war remains in dispute among experts, although all agree that the numbers are unsustainable on both sides, even over the course of a war much shorter than the 118 years it would take Russia to completely control Ukraine. Earlier this year, Trump himself estimated that Russia has lost 1 million troops (a rate that would leave Russia, whose current population is 143 million, empty before its forces can reach Lviv). Most others estimate a much lower number; Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, estimated that Russia suffered 427,000 casualties last year (including but not limited to deaths), a number that is surely inflated.

Barros told me that Russia’s ability to recruit new personnel is “completely busted.” Vladimir Putin has relied on mercenary and convict soldiers, combined with lavish bonuses for poor Russians who volunteer to try their luck against killer Ukrainian robots on the steppe. Barros described a delicate social contract between Putin and his citizens: “The contract is: I don’t force you to go fight in Ukraine. I pay you to go fight in Ukraine.” Russian oblasts are responsible for recruitment, and Samara Oblast has offered a sign-up bonus of $36,000, “not including the other benefits and entitlements in your salary,” Barros said. This is the equivalent of two or three years’ pay, handed over upon enlistment.

In a poor country like Russia, handing out fistfuls of rubles is the very definition of desperation. Russia has inflation at rates approaching 20 percent (officially, they are about 9 percent), and it has been sucking its own sovereign wealth fund dry. But Ukraine is poor, too, and has man-power issues to match Russia’s. Liscovich pointed out that Russia’s population is three times Ukraine’s and that when the money runs out, its population can be forced to serve—which means it would be in roughly the same demoralized state that Ukraine is in right now. “The Russians are more fatalistic [than the Ukrainians] about joining the military,” Liscovich told me. “They’re far, far more obedient when it comes to state action.”

The very fact that there is a debate to be had about which country has the advantage in this war shows a remarkable inversion in expectation. Early on, even after Ukraine’s initial Javelin-enabled repulsion of the first wave of Russian invasion, pessimists noted that time favored Russia, the larger and richer of the two countries, and the one whose military had more experience with slow, grinding wars. “In 2022, all the analysts assumed that Putin and Russia would be better equipped to weather a long-term, protracted war against a smaller Ukraine,” Barros said. “That assumption has been invalidated. Protracting the conflict now actually hurts the Russians more than the Ukrainians.”

At their most humane, Trump’s Russia-Ukraine statements focus on the daily massacre afflicting both sides. “The big thing is the number of soldiers,” he said at the beginning of the Zelensky meeting, before it went sour. “We’re losing a lot of soldiers, and we want to see it stop.” The war will end in a deal. Why not a deal now rather than a deal in a year? A deal now might spare 1 million Russians and Ukrainians. But this macabre calculation is more complicated when one considers that Ukraine has been fighting for independence and survival. If these goals are now beyond its reach, then prompt surrender, or whatever Trump and Putin propose, is the only option. But Ukraine seems to think that if Russia seizes its territory at the current rate, Russia will eventually run out of men, tanks, money, and the will to fight. If Ukraine is in that position—having to hold out, and suffer and inflict more death and destruction for another year or more—then its position is unenviable, but it is not a losing one.