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Michael Clarke went through several of your questions over little more than half an hour, taking on issues around European defence, Donald Trump's red lines and how Volodymyr ZelenAG百家乐在线官网y will be remembered.

You can scroll down for his take on those and other matters - or you can watch him give his insight in full in the video above and in the YouTube link below.

We're finishing off with some questions on Donald Trump.

Could it be that Trump is happy to let Russia at least keep some of the land its taken illegally because he hopes to do the same?

Michael Clarke says Trump is "really serious" about Greenland, adding he's also "pretty serious" about Panama and Canada.

He explains that Trump talks in terms of "physical enlargement".

"He talks in imperialist terms because in a sense, he's an imperialist himself," he says. 

"That is music to the ears of those in Moscow and Beijing because they're imperialists... we are into into a new world of great power imperialism now. 

"Trump's attitude towards other people's territory is part of that new order."

At the end of Trump's term of office and assuming a new president returns to an older way of doing things, could/should Europe and Canada ever trust the USA again? Are we in a brave new world?

Clarke says the MAGA Republicanism may end up lasting a lot longer than Trump himself if he is succeeded by a MAGA Republican.

"This might be a 12-year process or longer, so it might be the 2040s before the US changes again," he adds.

Clarke explains that 1917 is the key year when the US really became a global power.

That same year, the Bolshevik Revolution took place.

"One of the fundamental geopolitical realities is a century old commitment for Washington to oppose what Moscow is trying to do in the world, with the brief exception of about three or four years during the Second World War," Clarke adds.

But he says 1917 is important for another reason.

Clarke says that when Vladimir Lenin was in exile in Germany before being sent to Moscow to "make the most of the Russian revolution," he famously said in November of that year "for decades nothing happens and then decades happen in weeks".

Clarke ends by saying right now, decades are happening in weeks.

"I fear not," says Clarke.

"The longer they go on, the harder it is for the protest movement to make any real inroads."

Clarke says former president Salome Zourabichvili is a "really brave lady" and says it was a "key moment" when she said she refused to step down in the face of the new "tinpot government".

"But that was some time ago now," he adds. "I remember saying at the time that things will either break this week or they will just continue. And I'm afraid they've just continued."

For context: Georgia has grown closer to Moscow in recent years, with many Georgians concerned about the growing influence Russian President Vladimir Putin has on the country.

Protests erupted in Tbilisi last summer after the government passed a "foreign agents" bill modelled on laws used by Putin to crack down on the media in Russia.

In December, pro-Russian MP Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former Manchester City footballer, was appointed Georgian president by the country's disputed parliament.

Watch as protesters mock the then newly elected president back in December by waving red cards and kicking footballs...

International affairs editor Dominic Waghorn was in Tbilisi last summer to witness mass protests in Georgia against Putin's influence - read that here...

Politically, "there aren't really any" red lines for Donald Trump, says Clarke.

"At the moment America is offering nothing but carrots - it's all sticks for Ukraine, all the carrots to Russia," he says, after two contrasting calls with the Ukrainian and Russian leaders and Trump this week.

"President Trump has said that there are lots of pressures he can bring to bear, but he seems very reluctant to do that.

"My one sense for an American red line would be real humiliation."

If Trump feels the Russians were laughing at him, Clarke believes that would trigger a response in the US president.

The World podcast: Trump-Putin call - ending one war, preparing for another? 

But Russia is "too clever" to show signs of that in public.

"Political red lines - there aren't really any... he wants to get Ukraine out of the way because what he wants is a partnership with Russia for completely different geopolitical reasons," Clarke adds.

"And so, for him, what he wants is to get some sort of deal and however badly that leaves Ukraine, if he can get away with the deal for two to three years before it collapses - and it might be in Russia's interests to stick with some sort of deal until he's out of the White House - stick with it, because there are other benefits to them if they do.

"If that's his attitude, which I think it is, then there are no red lines insofar as they apply to Ukraine."

Our presenter Kamali Melbourne sneaks in a question, asking why Japan would want to join Sir Keir Starmer's so-called coalition of the willing - countries that want to support Ukraine.

It may appear surprising, Clarke says, as Japan has been a "deeply pacifist" country after its experience during the Second World War until about the past 10 to 15 years.

"Its constitution means that its forces can only be self-defence forces," he says. 

"They're not allowed to undertake anything that could be construed as offensive operations, so everything they do has to look as if it's self-defence. 

"In reality, what they've done is things like anti-piracy, and they've done peace support operations with their navies, and they're pretty good."

He explains that Japan takes the same view of the Ukrainian crisis as most European countries, and argue this is "fundamental to the democratic world".

"They see a resurgent Russia as extremely bad for them, just as it's extremely bad for Europe," he adds.

Ward is referring to a decision from Germany to allow a huge increase in the country's defence and infrastructure spending.

The law will exempt spending on defence and security from Germany's strict debt rules, and create a 鈧�500bn ($547bn; 拢420bn) infrastructure fund.

On whether it will be a game changer, Clarke says it will.

"Yes is the answer to the question. It is a game changer in European terms," he says.

But Clarke says the Germans still have to decide exactly how much of the 鈧�500bn is actually spent on defence.

He also points out the proposal from new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is not popular, with "both the left and the right" in Germany against the bill, and that it still needs to be ratified by the upper house.

"Next week they get into parliament in the new arrangement and it will be much harder for much then to push through the things he's now talking about," Clarke adds.

"So yes, it's a game changer, but I think we will still see a lot of angst in Germany."

Looking at the impact this will have on the German economy, Clarke says it has "floating on the edge of recession" for a while now.

"Putting money into armaments is not the best way to regenerate an economy, but it does have a regenerative effect," he adds.

"It happened in America in the 1930s. It happened in the European countries in the late 1930s. It does have an effect. 

"There are more efficient ways to regenerate an economy. But history doesn't always give you the opportunity to play those games."

Read more on Germany's efforts to rearm in this piece from Europe correspondent Siobhan Robbins here...

If Putin were to ignore aspects of a potential peace deal, it could lead to a fracture between Europe and the US "of the sort we haven't yet seen so far", Michael Clarke says.

If a truce were to break down or be so limited that it fails to secure peace, it would pose "real difficulties" for Europe.

"The Europeans have said 'we will not let Ukraine down... and if Ukraine ends up keeping on fighting for whatever reason, we will help them' - and that might be a very unpopular position in the United States," he says.

If the war goes on, Clarke says the Americans would get "very annoyed" with the Ukrainians and order them to stop fighting and to let the Russians take "whatever they need to take".

"And the Europeans will say to the Ukrainians, 'we will keep on supporting you'," Clarke adds.

"And there could be a real divergence down the road between Europe and the United States, of the sort we haven't yet seen so far.

"Everything the Europeans have done can be regarded as complementary to what the United States is trying to do.

"But if what the United States is trying to do fails and there is no truce, then the Europeans probably quite likely will find themselves getting further and further away from the American position.

"That would be a very uncomfortable place to be."

But what could Europe actually do?

Clarke says the continent would have to give "more supplies" and "more emergency building of the things that America has got", which it might turn off.

"In the short term, that will be really quite hard," Clarke says.

"In the medium term, it's doable - a couple of years or more - if we had a real push at it."

In principle, Europeans can replace "everything the Americans could take away", but they've "really got to go for it" starting now.

Vladimir Putin has broken scores of deals, Clarke says - specifically 190.

He highlights some examples, one of the most important ones on Ukraine being the Minsk Agreements in 2014, signed in an effort to end fighting after Putin invaded Crimea in February that year.

"The biggest one of all, I suppose, was 1994, the Budapest Memorandum, which is when Ukraine gave up its, its nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the old Soviet Union, and Ukraine was the one country that could have used them," Clarke says. 

"I mean, the other countries were Kazakhstan and Belarus. They couldn't really have done anything with the weapons that they inherited. But Ukraine had the expertise. 

"They could have had their own nuclear force that would have worked if they chose to, but they gave it up in 1994, in return for security guarantees."

Clarke explains that Russia has been more consistent on agreements when it involves Russian companies.

He says that when Gazprom supplied gas to Europe, "they always stuck to their contracts, they always did until about 2008".

But Clarke says Putin then went on to enter his "aggressive phase," playing games every winter over isolating Ukraine and Ukrainian pipelines from the rest of the European supply.

 "You wouldn't imagine so," says Clarke.

Ian asks this question after Donald Trump suggested that the US could take over the running of Ukraine's nuclear power plant in the event of any peace deal with Russia as a form of security guarantee.

Clarke points out there are five nuclear plants to look after for the US, which would be "quite a big deal" for them to do.

The Zaporizhzhia plant in the south represents a "real problem" because the plant is in Russian-occupied territory, raising questions over how the US would physically be able to control it.

The idea "isn't quite as loopy" as Trump's plans to turn Gaza into the "Middle East Riviera", adds Clarke, but he says it's still a "lumpy" plan that you only to need to think about for 30 seconds "to see it would be a mess".

"What President Trump is trying to do, quite clearly, is to think about non-military ways of offering some reassurance to a future Ukraine," he says.

Clarke argues the proposal would benefit Trump, as the more American companies involved in helping Ukraine would be good for the president's image.

However, he says Trump "probably didn't think" about the idea much before suggesting it to ZelenAG百家乐在线官网y.

Would US companies want to help?

Clarke points out that there is no guarantee that US companies would even want to go to Ukraine to help keep the nuclear plants safe.

"I may be wrong about this, but I can't think of an example of companies that are willingly gone into a civilian project that is in the middle of a potential war zone, because companies always are looking for stability," he says.

"They may not be looking for huge profits, but they're always looking for long term stability, particularly in big infrastructure projects where the payoff is several years down the line."

Volodymyr ZelenAG百家乐在线官网y will certainly be remembered as the man who stood up to Russia and didn't run into exile, says Michael Clarke.

"I think it was the second night of the war when... we all expected ZelenAG百家乐在线官网y to be dead by the end of the week, along with his family," he says.

"And he came out on to the streets of Kyiv, which was a very dangerous thing to do at that moment, because there were still sabotage squads roaming the streets looking for him, trying to get into the palace to shoot him.

"And he said, 'I'm not going anywhere, I'm here, the military defence is here, the government is here'." 

He says that was "one of the most fundamental speeches of our era".

His popularity has "waxed and waned" and his democratic mandate ran out last May, Clarke adds.

"And so he's now a sort of martial law leader, which means he's got the legitimacy of a Premier League football manager, which is to say you've got to be successful," he says.

"His star may wane, and internally there are issues, but he will always be remembered as the man who stood up to the Russians and didn't run into exile, didn't let the Russians walk straight into Kyiv. And I think that's imperishable."

Family under threat

ZelenAG百家乐在线官网y had that "thousand yard stare" in his face after the first eight or nine months, Clarke says.

"And the strain is obvious, not just on him, but on his family," he continues.

"His poor family... they're under threat now for the rest of their lives. 

"Putin is a vengeful leader, and he behaves like a mafia boss... and they're coming for them for the rest of their lives, they'll try and assassinate them wherever they end up."