At Lancaster House, a 19th century mansion adjacent to Buckingham Palace, it felt like a moment of truth for Europe, as the continent’s biggest powers gathered to try to rescue something from a crumbling postwar order.
Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron, working in tandem, had a clear message in London: Europe has to prove to Donald Trump that it is part of the solution to the crisis on its own continent, not part of the problem.
As one of the UK prime minister’s allies put it before the meeting, there was no alternative to patching things up with the White House: “The PM will bring people together and politely make sure they realise that there is only one negotiation in town — and that’s President Trump’s.”
Sifting through the diplomatic debris of Trump’s disastrous Oval Office confrontation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Starmer and Macron made it clear on Sunday that Europe had to intervene to try to salvage any notion of peace from the war in Ukraine.
Starmer said that meant Britain and France would hammer out with Zelenskyy what a post-truce settlement might look like in Ukraine and then take the European plan to Trump, acting as mediators in the toxic relationship between Kyiv and Washington.
The British prime minister insisted on Sunday that any final deal would have to involve Ukraine — including any agreement on where the post-hostility truce “line” would be drawn with Russia — but in the meantime, Europe would be spearheading the diplomacy on Kyiv’s behalf.
That delicate — perhaps impossible task — will now fall to three European leaders with whom Trump appears to have the best relations: Starmer and Macron, who visited the White House last week — and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.
“It is very, very important that we avoid the risk that the west divides,” Meloni told Starmer in bilateral talks in Downing Street before the Lancaster House summit.
The prospect of a permanent rupture between Europe and the US is already causing glee in the Kremlin. Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, hailed Trump’s administration for “dramatically changing all its foreign policy configurations” and swinging towards Moscow’s view of its invasion of Ukraine.
Peskov told state television that Trump’s stance “largely coincides with our vision”. He said it had previously been “impossible to imagine” that the US and Russia would vote together on a UN resolution that did not blame Moscow for the conflict.
The real danger of a transatlantic rupture hung over the Lancaster House meeting, bathed in London’s early spring sunshine. As if to highlight the risk, Elon Musk, Trump’s bureaucracy-buster, quoted a post from a US political commentator on his X platform on Sunday saying it was “time to leave Nato and the UN”. The billionaire added: “I agree”.
Starmer and Macron have gone out of their way to throw a diplomatic arm around Zelenskyy — literally in the case of the UK prime minister at Downing Street on Saturday. King Charles also met the Ukrainian leader on Sunday.
But behind the hugs was a hard warning to the Ukrainian leader that the path to any durable peace runs though the White House and that Zelenskyy must start talking to Trump again and sign a deal to hand over some future mineral rights in his country to the US.
Starmer was at pains, according to British officials, to make it clear to Trump in a phone call on Saturday night that the Lancaster House summit was not a case of Europe trying to gang up against him.
“The prime minister’s priority is to do whatever it takes to defend Ukraine,” said a British official. “That means the US has to be involved. You have to fix that relationship and get back to that minerals deal.”
But Starmer, Macron and Meloni are also agreed, according to European diplomats, that they will have to lead the diplomatic efforts to preserve the US security guarantee, not just over Ukraine but over the whole continent.
Starmer and Macron have promised a UK-French led force to provide reassurance in the event of a truce in the Ukraine conflict and are urging other European countries to join a “coalition of the willing”. So far there has hardly been a stampede to help.
But they made it clear, according to British officials, that such a force would be doomed to fail unless the US provides a “backstop” — or more precisely air cover and surveillance to protect European troops on the ground.
Starmer also noted the dangers of flawed agreements with Putin, citing the failure of the Minsk accords on Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. “We cannot accept a weak deal like Minsk that Russia can breach with ease,” he said.
But Trump has given no indication he is prepared to offer assistance to ensure any agreement holds. European promises to re-arm — the president has been telling the continent to stop freeriding on US guarantees for the best part of a decade — may have come too late.
Trump told Starmer this week that he considered the future presence of American companies and workers in Ukraine — exploiting the country’s mineral reserves — to be enough of a deterrent to Putin.
Perhaps for want of other options, Europe is attempting to control the damage. Macron told La Tribune Dimanche newspaper on Sunday that he was “trying to make the Americans understand that disengagement from Ukraine is not in their interest”.
“We should not spare our effort to maintain a strong transatlantic bond,” Lithuania president Gitanas Nausėda wrote on X after a video call with Starmer and other Baltic leaders on Sunday morning.
There is also deep concern in some European capitals, especially those along the EU’s eastern flank that are most exposed to the Russian threat and especially dependent on American protection, that a rift with Trump over Ukraine could further undermine the US commitment to collective defence in Nato.
Meloni — a staunch supporter of Kyiv who also has good relations with Trump — has been pitching ideas to limit the fallout from the Oval Office row, with her public call for an immediate US-EU summit to jointly discuss Ukraine’s future, and a telephone conversation with Trump on Saturday night.
But Germany, Spain and Poland are among those countries that have not committed to sending troops to Ukraine, while the EU is only now drawing up a plan to try to boost the continent’s spending on defence.
There is growing frustration in London that some of Europe’s leaders need to stop publicly criticising Trump and his diplomatic assault on Zelenskyy and start showing the White House they have the will to take responsibility for their own backyard.
“What Ukraine needs now is guns and butter,” said one Starmer ally. “It doesn’t need people tweeting and virtue signalling.” At Lancaster House on Sunday there was plenty of talk, but Europe knows it now needs to act.
Additional reporting by Adrienne Klasa in Paris
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