Donald Trump has said he would love to have Russia return to the G7 group of advanced economies, and that expelling the country “was a mistake”.

Russia had been a member of the club of industrialised nations, then known as the G8, until it was excluded following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.

“I’d love to have them back. I think it was a mistake to throw them out. Look, it’s not a question of liking Russia or not liking Russia,” the US president said at the White House.

He also said that “high-level people from Russia” will attend the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

“Russia is going to be there with our people. Ukraine is also invited,” the president added.

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During a series of fast-paced announcements, including a series of US trade tariffs, he also said he wants to discuss reducing defence spending with Russia and China, halve domestic defence expenditure and support moves towards getting rid of nuclear weapons.

The US president had already announced on Wednesday that he and Vladimir Putin would start peace talks “immediately” to end the war in Ukraine.

But much of Thursday’s focus on global defence and spending came after a fractious NATO meeting in Brussels.

It has been an intense 24 hours of diplomacy in Brussels, during which:

• Ukraine’s president said his country must have a place at the negotiating table.

• The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov said Ukraine would be involved in peace talks “one way or another”.

• Donald Trump’s defence secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated the US vow to focus its military might away from Europe – telling NATO allies: “Trump won’t allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

‘Make NATO great again’

Mr Hegseth told NATO allies that the US will not guarantee Europe’s security and pressured leaders to spend more on their militaries.

He told reporters “we must make NATO great again” as he called on allies to do “far more for Europe’s defence”.

In terms of military spending, as a proportion of a country’s GDP, the US defence secretary said: “2% is a start… but it’s not enough. Nor is 3%, nor is 4% – more like 5% – real investment, real urgency.”

Sky News’ US correspondent Mark Stone, who was listening to Mr Hegseth’s comments, said “he represents one man, Donald Trump, and he speaks for him”.

Stone points out that, whether people will like him or loathe him, he “is not a man who has experience in the forum he now finds himself in”.

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‘Ukraine is just the first stage’

In response to the Trump administration’s shift in policy, a European defence minister warned the continent will see its “darkest times since the Second World War” as Russia seeks to rearm and regroup following any peace deal.

Dovile Sakaliene, Lithuania’s defence minister, told reporters: “China and Russia are going to coordinate their actions and if we are not able to work together as a team for the democratic world, it is going to be the darkest times since the Second World War.

“In a few years, we will be in a situation where Russia – with the speed that it’s developing its defence industry and its army – is going to move forward.”

“We all understand that Ukraine is just the first stage currently of an imperial expansion of Russia.”

She added that NATO partners have a stark choice – rebuild their armed forces and defence industries “swiftly and very significantly” or find themselves “in a very difficult situation to put it diplomatically”.

Senior politicians in Moscow crowed over the thawing of relations between Russia and the US after presidents Trump and Putin held a 90-minute phone call on Wednesday.

Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and current security official, mocked Europe’s role on the world stage and said the continent is “mad with jealousy and rage” and that “Europe’s time is over”.

Taken at face value Donald Trump’s embrace of reciprocal tariffs is a declaration of total trade war, that would amount to perhaps the single biggest peacetime shock to global commerce.

In promising to levy import taxes on any nation that imposes tariffs or VAT on US exports, he is following through on a campaign promise to address a near trillion dollar trade deficit – the difference between the value of America’s exports and its imports – that he believes amounts to a tax on American jobs.

In response, he wants to deploy tariffs as an “external revenue service”, simultaneously easing the US deficit and, so the theory goes, pricing out imports in favour of domestic production.

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With a promise to reestablish industries, from chip production lost to Taiwan, and car and pharmaceutical manufacturing to Europe, he is promising a country-by-country tailored assault on the status quo.

Risk to Britain remains uncertain

His primary targets appear to be the major trading partners with whom the trading deficit is greatest.

Mexico and Canada, the European Union (whose 10% tariff on US cars is a particular irritation), as well as the ‘BRICS’ nations – Brazil, Russia, India (which imposes 9% tariffs on US imports), China and South Africa.

What it means for the UK will not be certain until the details are revealed in April, but it is a blow to the emerging view in Whitehall that Britain might wriggle through the chaos relatively unscathed.

To begin with, the US runs a trade surplus with the UK – in a quirk of statistics, the UK thinks it has a surplus too – and Brexit has placed it outside the EU bloc with the ability at least in theory to be more agile.

The UK also imposes direct tariffs on very few US goods following a deal in 2021, brokered by then trade secretary Liz Truss, that removed tariffs on denim and motorcycles bound for Britain, and cashmere and Scotch whisky heading the other way.

But we do add VAT to imports, and Mr Trump’s threat to treat the sales tax as a tariff by another name will chill British exporters.

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Tariffs set to raise prices in US

Analysts have estimated tariffs could add 21% to the cost of exports, amounting to a £24bn blow to national income.

Pharmaceuticals, cars, chemicals, scientific instruments and the aerospace industry – the main components of our £182bn US export trade – will all be potentially affected.

But the pain will certainly be shared.

Tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and even Mr Trump accepts they will be inflationary.

Rising prices on Main Street could yet be the biggest brake on the president’s tariff plan.

You should always give peace a chance. That US President Donald Trump “thinks out of the box” is already the cliche of the moment.

And he may bring a fresh way of thinking and a new energy to ending Russia’s war in Ukraine where others have failed.

But there are some ominous signs already, bolstering fears Ukraine has been betrayed before the talks have even started.

Mr Trump could not bring himself on Wednesday even to say Ukraine and Russia were equal partners in any future negotiations.

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Asked if they were, he said: “Hmm, that’s an interesting question.”

The Ukrainians, he said, “will have to make peace”.

“Their people are being killed, and I think they should make peace,” he added.

More worryingly, he seems as prepared as ever to trust Vladimir Putin.

He seems happy to take the word of a man who sent agents to Britain to kill with chemical weapons, who lied repeatedly about his plans to invade Ukraine, and who has murdered in cold blood every rival who dared to challenge him.

“He insisted that if it (the conflict) ends, he wants it to end,” Mr Trump said, as if that was all there is to it.

“He does not want to end it and then go back to war in six months.”

In the same way, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 waving a piece of paper declaring “peace in our time” after winning what he thought were similar assurances from Adolf Hitler.

For Ukrainians, the parallels with 1938 do not end there.

They are being told even before negotiations start that they will have to give up some of their land that has been taken by brutal force.

Ukrainians compare that with Czechoslovakia being forced to hand over the Sudetenland to Hitler. Chamberlain believed that would be enough to appease Hitler. We all know what followed.

They have every reason to be worried.

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There is nothing in what the Russian president has said to make anyone believe giving him a fifth of Ukraine will be enough to appease him either.

In fact, in speeches, he has been emphatically and explicitly clear time and time again. He wants all of Ukraine because he believes it is part of Russia.

And then he wants the security architecture of Europe refashioned.

And Mr Trump seems to be caving into Mr Putin on that as well, giving into one of the key pre-war demands he made in 2021 before invading his neighbour, the reduction of America’s footprint in NATO in Europe that was declared by US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth in Brussels yesterday.

Trump is surrendering much of the leverage he had over the Russians before talks have even begun. This is from a man who declared in his book The Art of the Deal that leverage is everything in negotiations.

“Don’t make deals without it.”

It is curious and inexplicable. Except that Mr Putin has always appeared to have some kind of hold over Mr Trump.

When they last met in Helsinki, the president sided with Mr Putin over his own spies on the question of Russian election interference.

As a spy in east Germany, Mr Putin was trained in KGB techniques of understanding your enemy and deceiving them.

He has used those skills all his career, not least with George W Bush who famously naively said: “I looked into his eyes and I saw a soul. I trusted him.”

If Mr Trump is persuaded to side with Mr Putin over Ukraine, a dictator will have been rewarded for invading his neighbour. Aggression will have prevailed.

A precedent will have been set that has alarming implications for other countries neighbouring Russia and further afield.

In the east, as he ponders how to seize Taiwan by force, China’s Xi Jinping will be learning lessons too.

The outcome of all this may well not be peace in our time. Quite the opposite.