Starmer to speak with coalition of the willing ahead of Zelensky-Trump meeting
The Prime Minister, France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Friedrich Merz will host the meeting of the coalition of the willing on Sunday afternoon.
Mr Zelensky will fly to Washington DC on Monday, where he will meet the US president for the next stage of talks.
The one-on-one in the Oval Office could pave the way for a three-way meeting alongside Russian leader Mr Putin, the US president has said.
The coalition of the willing, made up of 30-plus nations, is prepared to deter Russian aggression by putting troops on the ground in Ukraine once the war is over.
The meeting, which is expected to take place at approximately 2pm UK time, comes on the heels of Mr Trump's summit in Alaska with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
Mr Trump hoped to secure a peace deal from the talks at a military base in Anchorage, but both he and Mr Putin walked away without agreement on how to end the war in Ukraine.
The US leader, however, insisted 'some great progress' was made, with 'many points' agreed and 'very few' remaining.
Several news outlets have cited sources which claimed that during the negotiations Mr Putin demanded full control of Donetsk and Luhansk – two occupied Ukrainian regions – as a condition for ending the war.
In exchange he would give up other Ukrainian territories held by Russian troops.
Other outlets reported that Mr Trump is inclined to support the plan, and will speak to Mr Zelensky about it on Monday when they meet in the Oval Office.
After the Alaska summit, the US president told Fox News it was now up to the Ukrainian to 'make a deal' to end the war.
Sir Keir commended Mr Trump's 'pursuit of an end to the killing' following a phone call with the US president, Mr Zelensky and Nato allies on Saturday morning.
But he insisted Ukraine's leader must not be excluded from future talks to broker a peace in Ukraine.
The Prime Minister and European leaders appeared increasingly confident that Mr Trump will offer a 'security guarantee' of air support to back up allied troops on the ground in Ukraine.
The Prime Minister welcomed 'the openness of the United States, alongside Europe, to provide robust security guarantees to Ukraine as part of any deal'.
'This is important progress and will be crucial in deterring Putin from coming back for more,' he added.
But Mr Trump also appeared to have a change of heart on what he wants to achieve from the talks, indicating that he wants a permanent peace settlement rather than a ceasefire.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, the US president said: 'It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere ceasefire agreement, which often times do not hold up.'
Mr Putin described the meeting as 'timely' and 'useful' after leaving Alaska.
Experts have warned the face-to-face summit has risked legitimising the Russian leader, after he has been made a pariah by the international community for years.
Dr Neil Melvin, director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said: 'Vladimir Putin came to the Alaska summit with the principal goal of stalling any pressure on Russia to end the war.
'He will consider the summit outcome as mission accomplished.'
I received a report from Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. The front, the defense of positions, and up-to-date information on the intentions and movements of the Russian army. We are defending our positions along the entire front line, and for the second day in a row, we have…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 16, 2025
Ukraine's president Mr Zelensky warned Russia may ramp up its strikes against his country in the coming days 'in order to create more favourable political circumstances for talks with global actors'.
Kyiv's troops are 'defending our positions along the entire front line', he added on social media site X.
Mr Zelensky had earlier insisted a ceasefire must include an end to fighting on land, in the sea and the air, as well as the return of all prisoners of war and captured civilians, including children.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
8 minutes ago
- Times
Trump's cynical bluster has echoes of Vietnam
In Anchorage on Friday, the president of the United States was confronted with the truth of an old superpower adage: it is easier to bully allies than to bend enemies. Since January, Donald Trump has enjoyed remarkable success in causing formerly friendly countries to submit without retaliation to his tariffs and insults. They have thus far preferred this course to an escalation of hostilities — and hostilities are what tariffs represent — with the most powerful nation on earth. America has become widely disliked and feared, especially in Europe and Canada. Most national leaders nonetheless continue to abase themselves before Trump, though Sir Keir Starmer may already regret his gushingly enthusiastic weekend remarks about the Alaska summit. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, is an utterly different proposition. He is pursuing a nationalist agenda, to the point of obsession. He has no interest in compromise over Ukraine. He is bent upon victory. He seeks to recreate what some would call a sphere of influence but which we should recognise as a sphere of coercion, extending from Georgia through Ukraine and Belarus, and thereafter beyond. • Putin demands Ukraine surrender the Donbas as price of peace He is convinced that he can achieve this because he continues to command support among his own people. Sanctions are porous and his armed forces are slowly grinding down Ukraine. Europe is weak — incapable of arming Volodymyr Zelensky if the US quits. Putin believes that Trump will give him what he wants. The evidence from Friday's summit suggests that he is right. The president cares nothing for Zelensky and his country but respects the master of the Kremlin. He likes dictators and clings to hopes of prising Russia apart from China, which he views as the only adversary that should matter to Americans. Incomprehensible though it seems to us, he is more eager to build a relationship with Putin than to stay friends with Europe. A precedent for Trump's clumsy and cynical attempts to end the war lies in America's diplomatic efforts to disengage from Vietnam, half a century ago. President Lyndon Johnson initiated talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1968. These got nowhere, for the same reason that olive branches are wasted on Putin. Hanoi was interested only in victory. Meanwhile, just as Zelensky is cut out of Trump's conversations with the Russians, so during the Indochina wars no South Vietnamese was invited to attend a significant White House policy meeting, nor indeed the Paris peace talks. Trump should never have attempted a bilateral with Putin because he is too verbally incontinent to negotiate rationally with an iceman such as Putin. Henry Kissinger, though incomparably cleverer, suffered constant frustrations when he became US emissary facing the North Vietnamese in Paris. Only in October 1972, weeks before a presidential election in which Richard Nixon faced the Democrat George McGovern, did Kissinger finally agree draft terms with the communist diplomat Le Duc Tho. When he arrived back in Washington, he strode into the White House bursting with excitement. 'The deal we've got, Mr President,' he was taped telling his employer, 'is so far better than anything we dreamt of. I mean, it will absolutely, totally, wipe out McGovern.' • We are no closer to peace, say Ukrainian refugees in Britain That remark did no service to Kissinger's reputation, because it made explicit that he viewed escape from Vietnam principally as a partisan political coup. He told Nixon that, while the agreement could be billed as 'peace', it would empower Hanoi to seize the South after a decent interval. Eighteen months should be enough, said Kissinger: 'If we settle it, say, this October, by January '74 no one will give a damn.' Nixon was so delighted that at lunch he invited his surrender broker to share a Lafite Rothschild 1957, such as the president customarily indulged alone, serving Californian red to the help. A deal was finally signed in Paris in January 1973. The Americans went home. Two years later I was among the unhappy eyewitnesses as Hanoi's army swept south to Saigon. Vietnam was, of course, a war in which the US had become directly and bloodily involved, unlike Ukraine, where it is merely arming a sovereign, West-leaning state to defend itself. What the two conflicts have in common, however, is that by 1973 Nixon's nation desperately wanted out of Indochina; in 2025, only a minority of Americans care a fig for Ukraine. Trump has not yet borrowed Neville Chamberlain's 1938 line about Czechoslovakia — 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing' — but his vice-president JD Vance has come close. Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, told CNN last week that 'no big chunks' of Ukrainian territory would be 'just given' to Russia 'that haven't been fought for or earned on the battlefield'. That remark should send a shiver through every advocate of freedom, every opponent of permitting brute force to determine outcomes. The signature on Nixon's Vietnam peace deal was delayed for almost four months, chiefly by the resistance of the South's president, Nguyen Van Thieu. Nixon bullied him into acquiescence at a meeting during which he shouted: 'Without aid, you're finished! Understand?' Yes, the wretched Vietnamese was obliged to understand. That nasty conversation in the Oval Office has a contemporary resonance, does it not? Without American aid Ukraine, too, is finished. Kissinger shamelessly accepted a half-share of a Nobel peace prize which Le Duc Tho, his interlocutor, had the integrity to reject. Trump today makes plain his own ambition to secure this honour, plausibly for a similar shoddy betrayal, though Ukraine is an incomparably worthier cause than was South Vietnam. On Monday the president is expected to tell Zelensky, and the European leaders whom he has also summoned to make complicit in Ukraine's future, that to halt the Russian rape of his country he must surrender the east, renounce hopes of joining Nato or the EU and sign a deal that includes no credible security guarantee. Putin is determined to pull every string of a future puppet government in Kyiv. It is not too late for Donald Trump to change course, and we should cling to hopes that he will do so. The only rightful, statesmanlike response to Putin's murderous obduracy is for the US to boost arms supplies to Ukraine and escalate sanctions against Russia. If, instead, the president demands that Zelensky rolls over, we shall have cause to despair of his ever fulfilling the traditional role of successive US presidents, as the West's principal standard-bearers for freedom and justice. Next month's presidential state visit to London seems an ever more cringe-making prospect. There is malicious gossip in Washington that on the plane to Anchorage a triumphalist Putin and his acolytes ate chicken Kyiv. It will be a historic tragedy if Trump proves to have served it to them.
The Independent
10 minutes ago
- The Independent
Starmer and European allies travel to Washington with Zelensky for crunch talks
Sir Keir Starmer will join European leaders in presenting a united front with Volodymyr Zelensky at his crunch meeting at the White House with Donald Trump. The Prime Minister and six other political leaders will travel to Washington DC on Monday, with the aim of protecting Ukraine from having to submit to Russian land grabs as a price for peace. Those joining Sir Keir include France's Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Friedrich Merz, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Alexander Stubb, president of Finland. Nato chief Mark Rutte and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen are also attending. Mr Zelensky is expecting to face calls from the US president to concede to full Russian control of Donetsk and Luhansk, two mineral-rich regions of Ukraine that are mostly occupied by Vladimir Putin's forces. In exchange for these demands, the Russian president would reportedly withdraw his forces from other areas of Ukraine and accept a Nato-like guarantee that Ukraine would be protected from further incursion. The European leaders have said it is up to Ukraine to decide how it wishes to end the war, and hailed Mr Zelensky's commitment to a peace that is both 'just and lasting'. Mr Trump has appeared to drop his calls for a ceasefire after a summit in Alaska with his Russian counterpart on Friday. Mr Putin has long refused to agree to a ceasefire as a precondition for talks to end the war, prompting fears that Russia could continue gaining ground in Ukraine as negotiations take place. The US president has instead said he wants to focus a long-term peace deal, though his secretary of state Marco Rubio has signalled a deal is 'still a long ways off'. There will be 'additional consequences' for Russia if it does not agree to a peace deal, Mr Rubio added, though he suggested fresh financial sanctions would be unlikely to force Mr Putin to the negotiating table. Ms von der Leyen suggested at a press conference on Sunday that both a ceasefire and a peace deal would have the same impact: to 'stop the killing'. Appearing alongside her, Ukraine's Mr Zelensky appeared to agree, though he also signalled his preference for a ceasefire. 'It's impossible to do this under the pressure of weapons. So it's necessary to cease fire and work quickly on a final deal,' he said. European leaders are also keen to hear from Mr Trump after he signalled he would provide a security guarantee to the coalition of the willing. The coalition, which is aimed at deterring future Russian aggression once peace is agreed, has argued it needs an American backstop, likely in the form of air support, to succeed. Over the weekend, Sir Keir was among the leaders who welcomed suggestions from Mr Trump that he was open to providing a guarantee, but details of what support would be provided were scant. Following a meeting of the coalition on Sunday afternoon, a Downing Street spokesman said Sir Keir praised Mr Zelensky's desire for a 'just and lasting peace' in Ukraine. Leaders of the coalition 'reaffirmed their continued support to Ukraine' at the meeting chaired by the PM and Mr Macron, No 10 added. The French president, meanwhile, said the European delegation will ask Mr Trump to back its plans to bolster Ukraine's armed forces. Ahead of their Oval Office encounter, the allies are likely to be mindful of the previous occasion Mr Zelensky visited Mr Trump in the White House. February's public spat, which saw Vice President JD Vance accuse Mr Zelensky of not being thankful enough to the US, resulted in American aid to Ukraine being temporarily halted.
ITV News
10 minutes ago
- ITV News
Starmer and European allies travel to Washington with Zelensky for crunch talks
Sir Keir Starmer will join European leaders in presenting a united front with Volodymyr Zelensky at his crunch meeting at the White House with Donald Trump. The Prime Minister and six other political leaders will travel to Washington DC on Monday, with the aim of protecting Ukraine from having to submit to Russian land grabs as a price for peace. Those joining Sir Keir include France's Emmanuel Macron, Germany's Friedrich Merz, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Alexander Stubb, president of Finland. Nato chief Mark Rutte and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen are also attending. Mr Zelensky is expecting to face calls from the US president to concede to full Russian control of Donetsk and Luhansk, two mineral-rich regions of Ukraine that are mostly occupied by Vladimir Putin's forces. In exchange for these demands, the Russian president would reportedly withdraw his forces from other areas of Ukraine and accept a Nato-like guarantee that Ukraine would be protected from further incursion. The European leaders have said it is up to Ukraine to decide how it wishes to end the war, and hailed Mr Zelensky's commitment to a peace that is both 'just and lasting'. Mr Trump has appeared to drop his calls for a ceasefire after a summit in Alaska with his Russian counterpart on Friday. Mr Putin has long refused to agree to a ceasefire as a precondition for talks to end the war, prompting fears that Russia could continue gaining ground in Ukraine as negotiations take place. The US president has instead said he wants to focus a long-term peace deal, though his secretary of state Marco Rubio has signalled a deal is 'still a long ways off'. There will be 'additional consequences' for Russia if it does not agree to a peace deal, Mr Rubio added, though he suggested fresh financial sanctions would be unlikely to force Mr Putin to the negotiating table. Ms von der Leyen suggested at a press conference on Sunday that both a ceasefire and a peace deal would have the same impact: to 'stop the killing'. Appearing alongside her, Ukraine's Mr Zelensky appeared to agree, though he also signalled his preference for a ceasefire. 'It's impossible to do this under the pressure of weapons. So it's necessary to cease fire and work quickly on a final deal,' he said. European leaders are also keen to hear from Mr Trump after he signalled he would provide a security guarantee to the coalition of the willing. The coalition, which is aimed at deterring future Russian aggression once peace is agreed, has argued it needs an American backstop, likely in the form of air support, to succeed. Over the weekend, Sir Keir was among the leaders who welcomed suggestions from Mr Trump that he was open to providing a guarantee, but details of what support would be provided were scant. Following a meeting of the coalition on Sunday afternoon, a Downing Street spokesman said Sir Keir praised Mr Zelensky's desire for a 'just and lasting peace' in Ukraine. Leaders of the coalition 'reaffirmed their continued support to Ukraine' at the meeting chaired by the PM and Mr Macron, No 10 added. The French president, meanwhile, said the European delegation will ask Mr Trump to back its plans to bolster Ukraine's armed forces. Ahead of their Oval Office encounter, the allies are likely to be mindful of the previous occasion Mr Zelensky visited Mr Trump in the White House. February's public spat, which saw Vice President JD Vance accuse Mr Zelensky of not being thankful enough to the US, resulted in American aid to Ukraine being temporarily halted.
