Trump and Putin are threatening to carve up Europe between them. Suddenly, it all feels a bit 1939 | Simon Tisdall

Forget the US president's seeming volte-face on Ukraine this week: he and Putin fundamentally agree that European liberal democracy is the problem

For many people in eastern Europe, August 1939 may not feel that long ago. That was the moment Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union secretly agreed to partition Poland and forcibly subsume the sovereign Baltic republics and Finland into their totalitarian spheres of influence". The world knows what came next.

Now the question arises: is it happening again? This time around, it's Donald Trump's United States and Vladimir Putin's Russia making the big geopolitical power-play - and, once again, all of Europe is potential prey. Notwithstanding last week's sparring over Ukraine, the two leaders' core aims appear closely aligned.

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator