Europe does not have a seat at the negotiating table: the message could not be clearer from Donald Trump's special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg. This week, the US president opened discussions with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin – with no Ukrainians present – at a high-level meeting in Riyadh and then seemingly blamed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war.

And that's assuming the tariff increases to just 10 per cent, not 25, as Trump announced. Mercedes-Benz would lose one percentage point of margin if tariffs on cars exported to the US from Europe were raised from 2.