UK and France will work on own Ukraine peace plan, says Keir Starmer | Foreign policy

Britain and France will work on their own peace plan for Ukraine, Keir Starmer has said, as European leaders scramble to respond to Friday’s disastrous White House meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The prime minister told the BBC on Sunday that he and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had agreed to begin negotiations separate to those between the US and Russia, after a series of hurried phone calls on Saturday evening.

Starmer told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “We’ve now agreed that the United Kingdom, along with France and possibly one or two others, will work with Ukraine on a plan to stop the fighting, and then we’ll discuss that plan with the United States.”

He added: “The UK and France are the most advanced in the thinking on this, and that’s why President Macron and I are going to be working on this plan, which we’ll then discuss with the US.

“That is a step in the right direction. This is not an exclusion – the more the better in this. But we need to move to a quicker, more agile way of going forward, and I think that is a coalition of the willing states.”

Starmer spent Saturday engaged in intense diplomacy after Zelenskyy’s meeting in Washington, during which the Ukrainian president was berated live on camera by Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance.

The prime minister hosted Zelenskyy in Downing Street before calling both Macron and Trump as he sought to show solidarity for Ukraine while also repairing frayed ties between Washington and Kyiv.

Zelenskyy will meet King Charles at Sandringham on Sunday, while Starmer will host European leaders, as well as those from Canada and Turkey, for a defence summit in central London.

Meanwhile, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will sign a £2.3bn loan deal to allow Kyiv to buy more weapons, to be paid back using profits generated on Russian sovereign assets that are under sanctions.

Reeves has also said she will change the remit of the £27.8bn national wealth fund so it could be spent on defence as well as infrastructure projects.

Unlike several other European leaders, Starmer has so far refused to criticise Trump for his actions on Friday, a stance he defended on Sunday.

“I felt uncomfortable – nobody wants to see that,” he said. “But the important thing is how to react to that.

“There are a number of different routes people could go down. One is to ramp up the rhetoric as to how outraged we all are, or not.

“The other is to do what I did, which is, roll up my sleeves, pick up the phone, talk to President Trump, talk to President Zelenskyy, then invite President Zelenskyy for an extensive meeting yesterday … And then further, pick up the phone to President Macron and President Trump afterwards, because my reaction was, we have to bridge this.”

Starmer said the Franco-British peace plan could include “one or two others”, which he described as a “coalition of the willing”.

He said the talks would involve discussions over where the border would be drawn between Ukraine and Russia, but he admitted that any plan would still rely on American military cooperation, something Trump has not yet agreed to provide.

“It means a line that is agreed in the terms of the deal, and then that that line is defended,” Starmer said. “We [he and Trump] discussed this at length on Thursday, because you can’t have a deal that then falls apart.”

Starmer has said he is willing to commit British troops to defending any peace deal in Ukraine, but that doing so would not be safe unless they received communications, logistical and air support from the US.

He added that he did not trust the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to stick to the terms of any deal. He said, however, that he did trust both Zelenskyy and Trump, despite the latter’s wavering support for Ukraine.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, meanwhile, said on Sunday her “heart went out” to Zelenskyy.

She toId the Kuenssberg show: “I watched it and I couldn’t believe what was happening. He was being humiliated. I don’t think we should conduct these sorts of difficult conversations in front of the cameras, and we have to remember that President Zelenskyy is a hero.”