Starmer: G7 will discuss Russia sanctions if Putin holds out on ceasefire talks
The Prime Minister said targeting Moscow with further action would 'undoubtedly' form part of talks at the international summit this week unless the Kremlin engages in peace talks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to attend the conference in Canada, where leaders from the world's major economies are descending on a luxury mountain lodge in the Rockies for talks on global security.
Mr Zelensky has accepted a US-backed ceasefire proposal and offered to talk directly with his counterpart in Moscow, but the Russian leader has so far shown no willingness to meet him.
On to the G7.
In an era of global instability, I will do everything in my power to deliver safety and security for working people in Britain. pic.twitter.com/CEZknpuwvR
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) June 15, 2025
Speaking to reporters travelling with him to Kananaskis, Sir Keir was asked if he expects additional sanctions on Russia to be agreed by international partners.
'We've got President Zelensky coming, so that provides a good opportunity for us to discuss again as a group,' he said.
'My long-standing view is, we need to get Russia to the table for an unconditional ceasefire.
'That's not been really straightforward. But we do need to be clear about we need to get to the table and that if that doesn't happen, sanctions will undoubtedly be part of the discussion at the G7.'
Sir Keir faces a busy week of diplomacy with spiralling conflict in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine top of the agenda in the talks between leaders from Canada, the US, France, Italy, Japan, Germany and Britain.
It comes as the Foreign Office advised against all travel to Israel following further retaliatory attacks by Iran. Downing Street has not ruled out moving to evacuate UK nationals from the country if the situation deteriorates.
In his first bilateral meeting at the summit, the Prime Minister and his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni reiterated their 'enduring support' for Kyiv.
'(They agreed) that it is a topic of our common security that they looked forward to discussing in the next two days,' a Downing Street readout said, describing the conference as coming at a 'vitally important moment for the world'.
Sir Keir is also likely to have talks with Donald Trump as well as Emmanuel Macron, with whom he has been making plans for a so-called 'coalition of the willing' to send peacekeeping forces to Kyiv.
The Prime Minister told reporters he had a 'good relationship' with the US president, which is 'important' at a time of heightened global instability.
'I've been saying, for probably the best part of six months now, we're in a new era of defence and security, a new era for trade and the economy,' he said.
'And I think it's really important for Britain to play a leading part in that, and that's what I'll be doing at the G7, talking to all of our partners in a constructive way.
'And I'm very pleased that I have developed good relations with all the G7 leaders.'
Meanwhile, Mr Trump said he had told his Russian counterpart that the war in Ukraine 'should end' in a phone conversation on Saturday.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, the US leader said: '(President Putin) feels, as do I, this war in Israel-Iran should end, to which I explained, his war should also end.'
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The Guardian
42 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Iran threatens to leave nuclear weapons treaty as Israeli bombing enters fourth day
Iran has threatened to leave the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) as Israel bombing raids entered a fourth day, underlining the conflict's potential to trigger a broader war and Tehran's race to construct a nuclear weapon. The human cost of the war continued to escalate with both sides broadening their range of targets, as G7 leaders convened in the Canadian rockies with no clear plan to end the conflict. As he left for the summit on Sunday, the US president, Donald Trump, told reporters: 'Sometimes they have to fight it out.' Iran's health ministry said that 224 people in Iran had been killed by Israeli attacks, 90% of them civilian, and more than 1,400 had been injured. Israel's defence minister, meanwhile, threatened further bombing strikes on Tehran, where an exodus of residents has been reported, clogging roads out of the capital. In Israel, at least 23 civilians have been killed in Iran's retaliatory missile strikes since Israel's initial surprise attack on Friday morning, and nearly 600 have been injured, according to official sources. Both sides have targeted each other's oil and gas facilities, increasing the threat of environmental disaster, and explosions were reported on Monday near oil refineries in southern Tehran. The Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, announced on Monday that Iran's parliament, the Majlis, was preparing a bill that would withdraw the country from the 1968 NPT agreement, which obliges it to forego nuclear weapons and to undergo international inspections to verify compliance. Baghaei added that Tehran remained opposed to the development of weapons of mass destruction. The country's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, also insisted that Iran did not intend to develop nuclear weapons but would pursue its right to nuclear energy and research. He pointed out that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had issued a religious edict against weapons of mass destruction. Israel is the only Middle East state with nuclear weapons and did not sign the NPT, but has never formally acknowledged its arsenal. It is seeking to maintain its monopoly with air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, claiming that Tehran was close to building a bomb. Previous assessments by US intelligence and the UN nuclear watchdog found no evidence that Iran had begun work on assembling a nuclear weapon. Israeli critics of the offensive say it cannot destroy Iran's reserve of nuclear knowhow – though Israel has targeted Iranian nuclear scientists, claiming to have killed 14 – and could push the leadership into ordering the assembly of nuclear warheads. There were reports on Monday of Israeli strikes on the Tehran headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard Corps al-Quds force, an expeditionary arm deployed in foreign wars. Despite Israeli claims to have air superiority over much of Iran, Iranian forces have still been able to launch ballistic missiles from their territory and some continue to evade Israel's multi-layered air defences. IDF officials estimate that it is has been able to intercept 80-90% of Iran's missiles, with 5-10% hitting actual residential areas. Eight more Israelis were killed overnight by Iranian missile strikes, including four in Petah Tikva where a missile hit an apartment block. Three people died from blasts in Haifa and an elderly man was killed when his home collapsed from the shockwave from an explosion in Bnei Brak, east of Tel Aviv. Iran's Revolutionary Guards claimed to have begun strikes 'more powerful and deadly than previous waves,' and to have found a way of causing confusion in Israeli air defence systems. There was no immediate way of independently verifying the claim. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, reported on social media 'some minor damage from concussions of Iranian missile hits' near the US embassy branch office in Tel Aviv. An Israeli biology professor, Eran Segal, posted photos on X f damage to his laboratory at the Weizmann Institute, a scientific research centre which has been previously targeted by Iranian intelligence for its nuclear research. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Israeli strikes have caused damage to the above-ground part of the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, and to the nuclear complex in Isfahan. The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, reported on Monday that four buildings in Isfahan had been damaged in Friday's bombing raids: its central chemical laboratory, a uranium conversion plant, a plant making nuclear fuel for a research reactor in Tehran and a processing facility which had been under construction which would process enriched uranium into metal form, which is the form used in a nuclear warhead. Addressing the IAEA board of governors representing member states, Grossi said there were no signs of damage at the Fordow enrichment plant, which is deeply buried. Military commentators have suggested that Israel would find it hard to destroy Fordow and other underground facilities without the intervention of US forces, who have much bigger bunker-busting bombs. Iran urged the board to condemn Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites, which Grossi has also said are contrary to the UN charter and international law. Iranian state TV said the country fired at least 100 missiles at Israel, with no signs of a reduction in Iran's efforts to strike back against Israeli attacks, which have wiped out the top echelon of the Iranian military command. As Tehran residents evacuated the capital in increasing numbers, Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, threatened to make Tehranis 'pay the price' for Khamenei's decision to keep firing missiles at Israel in retaliation for the Israeli attack. 'The arrogant dictator from Tehran has become a cowardly murderer who deliberately fires at Israeli civilians to deter the IDF from continuing the attack that is tearing him down,' Katz wrote. 'The residents of Tehran will pay the price, and soon.' The Iranian state-backed news agency Fars reported that the authorities had executed a man found guilty of spying for Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad. It was the third execution of an alleged spy in recent weeks. Iran's chief justice, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, vowed there would be speedy trials anyone arrested on suspicion of collaboration. 'If someone is arrested for having ties to and collaborating with the Zionist regime, their trial and punishment should be carried out and announced very quickly, in accordance with the law and given the war conditions,' Ejei said, quoted by the Tasnim news agency. G7 leaders began gathering in the Canadian Rockies on Sunday with the Israel-Iran conflict expected to be a top priority. Before leaving for the summit on Sunday, Trump was asked what he was doing to de-escalate the situation. 'I hope there's going to be a deal. I think it's time for a deal,' he told reporters. 'Sometimes they have to fight it out.' Talks previously scheduled between the US and Iran in Oman on Sunday were cancelled and Iranian officials have signalled they will not resume any negotiations while their country is under attack. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said his goals for the summit were to try to ensure Iran did not develop or possess nuclear weapons, while ensuring Israel's right to defend itself. Merz added that Germany wanted to avoid escalation of the conflict and creating room for diplomacy. 'This issue will be very high on the agenda of the G7 summit,' Merz told reporters.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
G7 leaders ready for Trump in bear-proofed Canada
The last time world leaders gathered in Kananaskis, a bear tried to make its way into the 2002 meeting of the world's top eight economies and met an untimely end. This time, members of the G7 are developing strategies to handle a different formidable figure: President Donald Trump. It will be Trump's first time setting foot on Canadian soil since saying Canada was 'meant to be' the 51st U.S. state and slapping 25 percent tariffs on Canada's steel. U.S. statehood polls abysmally here, and the issue sets up a gathering that is anything but typical. 'He's not acting like an ally right now when he's trying to disrupt our economy and threatening to take us over. Even if he says it's a joke, it's not a joke. You don't treat another sovereign country like that,' Robert Mallach, a law professor at the University of Calgary told the Daily Mail. Mallach said other leaders should 'ignore' Trump at the summit, and said Canada's new Prime Minister Mark Carney took the best posture: 'Let's start protecting Canada by spending some money on defense. And let's realize we need allies other than America to do that.' Trump 'comes to the G7 running into allies who are quite frankly tired of the kind of threats and the kind of taunts that Trump has been engaged in,' said Brett Bruen, a former White House National Security Council official during the Obama administration. 'I think he's going to get a firsthand dose and dousing of reality, which is that these comments have consequences,' he said. 'I think this is one of those situations where Trump's bluster and bulldozing is going to run into some pretty hard, harsh realities on the international scene.' Still to be determined is whether Trump arrives ready for compromise, or feeling emboldened after watching a parade of MI Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles during the Army 250th military parade on his birthday in D.C. 'It certainly is going to put him in jingoistic mindset where he will feel, if not regal, at least replenished in his splendor, and that, as we've seen in the past, can lead to some really strange outbursts and sense of self-importance,' Bruen added. It is also unclear how much pre-planning fellow leaders have done. They could try to seek an 'intervention' on trade, although that could backfire. Canadian PM Mark Carney appears to have managed the situation deftly when he met with Trump in the Oval Office and declared his country not for sale while also pushing cooperation with Canada's more powerful neighbor. Now, he is holding out hope of a deal with the U.S. on trade and security. 'We're having intensive discussions in real time,' he said this week. Any agreement would progress compared to Trump's 2018 meeting with then-PM Justin Trudeau. That meeting ended in angry outbursts from Air Force One, with Trump calling Trudeau 'very dishonest and weak' and threatening to impose new auto tariffs. Russia's President Vladimir Putin attended the 2002 meeting, also in Kananaskis, during George W. Bush's presidency but got kicked out of the group after his 2014 annexation of Ukraine. This time, Putin's militarism will be a topic for other leaders to analyze, a day after Trump touted a forthcoming talk with him after Putin called with birthday greetings and the two talked about the war between Israel and Iran. A senior administration official previewing the summit sketched out the topics of discussion: 'trade in the global economy, critical minerals, migrant and drug smuggling, wildfires, international security, artificial intelligence and energy security.' The topic the official didn't mention are the deep tensions set off by Trump's repeated call to absorb the host country. The official did say that 'we appreciate Canada's cooperation in the planning of the summit and their choice of a great location in Canada for these important conversations.' Middle East security, with Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear program and military leadership and Iran firing missiles at Israel, is certain to soak up attention. French President Emmanuel Macron set the tone Sunday with a pointed visit to Greenland – a sprawling Arctic territory that Trump said the U.S. needed to obtain. 'I don´t think that´s something to be done between allies,' Macron said as he met with Danish PM Mette Frederiksen and Greenland's PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen. 'It´s important to show that Denmark and Europe are committed to this territory, which has very high strategic stakes and whose territorial integrity must be respected,' said Macron. As far as the actual bears roaming the G7 meeting spot in Kananaskis next to the Canadian Rockies, local officials have taken steps to avoid further mishaps. Among the security gear they trotted out early this month in advance of the event was a large bear trap. Local students were enlisted to pluck thousands of berries from area bushes so as to lower the temptations that might lure bears to try to crash the confab. That's what happened at the 2002 summit, when security officials used a bear-banger device to try to scare away a bear who got near delegates. It ended up falling out of a tree and dying.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
In times of political turmoil, the Speaker's ‘soft power' is important
The Speaker, however, is not a real-time fact checker of comments made from the Despatch Box. He is not responsible for what a Member, including the Prime Minister, says in the Chamber. He does not have the authority to require Ministers to give answers to questions. His role is impartial and he has no say or influence over government policy. The Speaker also has administrative responsibilities as Chair of the House of Commons Commission, which employs and cares for over 3,000 staff, runs the administration and services of the House, and oversees the maintenance of the Palace of Westminster and precincts. Furthermore, the Speaker represents the Commons as an institution in a wide range of public forums, both at home and abroad. He takes the lead in interparliamentary liaison and engages with people about the work and role of the democratically elected House: interactions that Speakers began more than 200 years ago. Many Speakers have represented the House on the international stage, at a range of interparliamentary events, including the G20 Speakers' Conference, the G7 Speakers' Conference, the Commonwealth Speakers and Presiding Officers Conference, and the Council of Europe Speakers' Conference. In these times of political turmoil, when democracy is under challenge, the use of the Speaker's 'soft power' is particularly important. For example, together with Ruslan Stefanchuk, President of the Ukrainian Parliament – the Verkhovna Rada – Sir Lindsay Hoyle has championed the democratic rights of Ukraine, at the G20 and G7 forums. Indeed, as early as 1944, the then Speaker, Clifton Brown, recognised the value of the Speaker's role in diplomacy and lead a parliamentary delegation to visit allied troops in Normandy. I hope this helps in a small way to explain the extensive role of the Speaker – and his office, which dates back to the 14th century. Jackie Storer, Press Secretary to the Speaker of the House of Commons, London. Shelling out at the Armadillo How on earth did anyone manage to get one of the 6,000 tickets to either of the two David Byrne concerts scheduled at the Armadillo for next March? Presale for these concerts began last Thursday, with General sale commencing at 10am on Friday. I went on to Ticketmaster at exactly 10am. Tickets started at just over £40. These were unavailable. By the time I'd read this message the only tickets available, for better seats, already cost £134.50. The time was now 10.01. Shortly afterwards, the cheapest ticket for Saturday was £265. I know of five other people who had the same dismal experience. Am I alone in suggesting that something is going wrong here? Sorry, David. We'd have loved to see you – but not at these exorbitant prices. Raymond Highet, Glasgow. Council must reject this plan This is an open letter to Glasgow City Council to ask it reject a planning submission being recommended for approval, for purpose-built student accommodation with ground-floor food hall, fronting onto Sauchiehall Street. Recommendations to reject have already been made by Historic Environment Scotland; Glasgow School of Art; The Mackintosh Society: fellow councillors Christy Mearns and Philip Braat; the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland; Glasgow City Heritage Trust and over 130 objectors and fellow Glaswegians. Seven years ago, on June 15, 2018, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's masterwork, the Glasgow School of Art, was almost destroyed by an inferno that lit up the city. The school of art board have promised a 'faithful reinstatement' of the building and today are working toward that aim. The fire that almost destroyed the school also seriously damaged the adjoining ABC cinema, to the extent that it had to be demolished and devastated a site that is one of the most important in the city, on one of Glasgow's most historic thoroughfares: Sauchiehall Street. Now a planning application for 350 student beds and a food hall is proposed to front onto Sauchiehall Street and replace the cinema. The massive structure will obscure Mackintosh's world-renowned south elevation but also detrimentally impact Alexander Thomson's A-listed Grecian building on the corner of Scott Street, as it is an unequivocally over-scaled, nine-storey structure of limited architectural merit. The application as proposed would have a significantly adverse impact within the conservation area and destroy the setting and appreciation of Mackintosh's masterwork, a building of great significance to Glasgow, Scotland and the world. In support of the application, images now being put forward by the developer show sunlight flooding into a proposed busy 'public space' at the rear of the proposed structure and fronting onto the south elevation of the school of art. As an architect who has built much in Glasgow, it is my view these images are misleading and only if you remove four or five storeys from the front onto Sauchiehall street then you may get some sunlight into such a space - in high summer. Like Professor Penny Macbeth, director and principal of the Glasgow School of Art, I agree that the redevelopment of the former ABC Cinema is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to positively transform this significant site and this part of the Sauchiehall Street. But this poorly-considered, cash- and opportunity-grabbing proposal is not that. City council planners have also agreed that this development would have a 'negative impact on the historic environment' but despite that have forwarded the plans for council approval, which I urge councillors to reject. Professor Alan Dunlop FRIAS, Aberfoyle.
