British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday announced a £1.6bn deal which would allow Ukraine to purchase 5,000 air-defence missiles using export finance.
Starmer urged European leaders to step up their defence efforts to not only help secure peace in Ukraine but stability across the continent at a summit staged as a show of support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that a halt in fighting could be a starting point for potential peace talks for Ukraine.
UK announces £1.6bn deal to fund air-defence missiles for Ukraine
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday announced a £1.6-billion deal which would allow Ukraine to purchase 5,000 air-defence missiles using export finance.
Starmer also said he did not accept that the US under President Donald Trump was an unreliable ally.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clashed with Trump and cut his Washington visit short.
Asked during a press conference whether the US was now an unreliable ally, Starmer said: “Nobody wanted to see what happened last Friday, but I do not accept that the US is an unreliable ally.
“The US has been a reliable ally to the UK for many, many decades, and continues to be. There are no two countries as closely aligned as our two countries and our defence, our security and intelligence is intertwined in a way no two other countries are.”
He dismissed calls to cancel the offer of a state visit to Trump.
Starmer at a meeting in Washington last week used a mixture of flattery and the invitation from the royal family for an unprecedented second state visit to try to win a commitment from Trump for a US security guarantee to protect Ukraine if a deal to end the war with Russia can be reached.
Some British politicians, including the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), called for the offer to be withdrawn after Trump accused Zelensky of not being grateful enough for US support in Ukraine’s war.
Asked if the state visit should be cancelled, Starmer criticised politicians who he said wanted to widen divisions with Washington at a time when Europe faces a “moment of real fragility”.
“I’m not going to be diverted by the SNP or others trying to ramp up the rhetoric without really appreciating what is the single most important thing at stake here, we’re talking about peace in Europe,” Starmer told the BBC.
The leader of the SNP, John Swinney, said on Sunday “it is hard to believe” that the offer to Trump still stands.
An opposition Conservative legislator, Alicia Kearns, previously the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also said that the visit should be paused until the US had offered to provide the security guarantee to Ukraine.
A petition calling for the invitation to be cancelled has attracted almost 70,000 signatures and some of the normally right-wing British newspapers have also been critical of Trump since his row with Zelensky. The Telegraph said Zelensky had been “undeservedly and disgracefully bullied”.
Starmer calls on Europe to step up to secure peace
Starmer urged European leaders on Sunday to step up their defence efforts to not only help secure peace in Ukraine but stability across the continent at a summit staged as a show of support for Zelensky.
Just two days after Zelensky clashed with US President Donald Trump and cut his Washington visit short, the Ukrainian leader was welcomed in London by world leaders, who hugged him in turn, and pledged their backing.
Starmer said Europe needed to meet a once-in-a-generation challenge.
“Getting a good outcome for Ukraine is not just a matter of right and wrong, it is vital for the security of every nation here and many others, too,” Starmer said at the beginning of the meeting, flanked by Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron.
“Today’s meeting is to unite to discuss how to deliver a just and enduring peace together and to make sure Ukraine can defend and protect against any future Russian attack.”
Trying to revive hope for peace in Ukraine, Starmer said urgent talks with Trump, Zelensky and Macron over the weekend had cemented the idea that a “coalition of the willing” in Europe would need to move quickly to come up with a peace plan to be presented to the US.
Lacking the weaponry and depth of ammunition stocks of the US, Starmer and Macron are trying to convince Trump that Europe can increase military spending and defend itself, but that Russia will only adhere to a peace deal that comes with the backing of the US.
Talks with the US have centred on Washington providing a so-called backstop for a European peacekeeping role, possibly in the form of air cover, intelligence and surveillance and a greater as yet unspecified threat if Russian President Vladimir Putin again sought to take more territory.
But crucial to getting any agreement from Trump is for European nations to increase defence spending and signal they would take part in any peacekeeping role — something Starmer acknowledged was difficult in terms of securing unanimity.
“The UK and France are the most advanced on the thinking of this and that is why President Macron and I are working on this plan, which we will then discuss with the US,” he said, adding he did not think Zelensky had done anything wrong on Friday.
“I do think we’ve got to probably get to a coalition of the willing now and move this forward.”
Starmer described watching the spat between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office as uncomfortable viewing, but was keen to push the conversation forward by offering himself as a go-between for Europe and the US.
Stopping the bombing would be a starting point for peace talks - Germany's Scholz
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Sunday that a halt in fighting could be a starting point for potential peace talks for Ukraine.
“It would be very helpful if the bombing were to stop… That would also be the starting point for talks that can then continue,” Scholz told journalists after a meeting of European leaders in London.
He said that a focus for allies will be to ensure that Ukraine has a strong army when the war there is over so that it can defend itself against any future aggression.
“The basis of everything will be a strong army,” said Scholz.
Europe must urgently rearm, says Von der Leyen
Europe urgently needs to rearm and member states must be given the fiscal space to carry out a surge in defence spending, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday after a meeting about support for Ukraine.
Von der Leyen added that Europe also needed to show the US that it was ready to defend democracy.
“After a long time of underinvestment, it is now of utmost importance to step up the defence investment for a prolonged period of time,” she told reporters after the meeting in London.
“Member states need more fiscal space to do a surge in defence spending.”
Russia praises Trump and scolds Europe
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Sunday praised Trump’s “common sense” aim to end the war in Ukraine, but accused the European powers which have rallied around Kyiv of seeking to prolong the conflict.
Lavrov said the US still wanted to be the world’s most powerful country and that Washington and Moscow would never see eye to eye on everything, but that they had agreed to be pragmatic when interests coincided.
President Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister of 21 years said the model of the US-China relationship was the one that should be built between Russia and the US to do a lot of “mutually beneficial things” without allowing disagreements to collapse into war.
“Donald Trump is a pragmatist,” Lavrov told the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, according to a transcript released by the Foreign Ministry. “His slogan is common sense. It means, as everyone can see, a shift to a different way of doing things.
“But the goal is still Maga [Make America Great Again],” said Lavrov, referring to Trump’s political slogan. “This gives a lively, human character to politics. That’s why it’s interesting to work with him.”
But Lavrov criticised Europe, saying that for the past 500 years Europe had been the crucible of “all the tragedies of the world” including colonisation, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon Bonaparte, World War One and Adolf Hitler.
“And now, after [former US president Joe] Biden’s term, people have come in who want to be guided by common sense. They say directly that they want to end all wars, they want peace,” said Lavrov.
“And who demands a ‘continuation of the banquet’ in the form of a war? Europe.”
Lavrov also dismissed European ideas for sending in a contingent of European peacekeepers and said Russia had no trust in Ukraine after the collapse of the Minsk agreements, which were designed to end a separatist war by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.
Europeans, Lavrov said, could not explain what rights Russian speakers would have under the European peacekeeper plans, adding that Russia did not like the idea of Europeans propping up Zelensky.
“Now they also want to prop him up with their bayonets in the form of peacekeeping units. This will mean that the root causes will not disappear,” said Lavrov.
US needs Ukrainian leader who wants peace, says security adviser Waltz
A top adviser to Trump said on Sunday that the US needed a Ukrainian leader who was willing to secure a lasting peace with Russia but that it was not clear Zelensky was prepared to do so.
White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said Washington wanted to secure a permanent peace between Moscow and Kyiv that involved territorial concessions in exchange for European-led security guarantees.
Asked whether Trump wanted Zelensky to resign, Waltz told CNN’s State of the Union programme: “We need a leader that can deal with us, eventually deal with the Russians and end this war.
“If it becomes apparent that President Zelensky’s either personal motivations or political motivations are divergent from ending the fighting in his country, then I think we have a real issue on our hands.”
House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson also suggested that a different leader might be necessary in Ukraine if Zelensky does not comply with US demands.
“Something has to change. Either he needs to come to his senses and come back to the table in gratitude, or someone else needs to lead the country to do that,” the top congressional Republican told NBC’s Meet the Press programme.
On ABC’s This Week programme, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had not spoken with Zelensky since Friday.
Rubio also said he had not spoken to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha since Trump and Zelensky clashed at the White House and failed to sign an expected minerals deal.
“We’ll be ready to reengage when they’re ready to make peace,” said Rubio on the show.
US Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, said on This Week that she was “appalled” by the clash in the Oval Office and that she met with Zelensky before he went to the White House on Friday and he had been excited to sign an expected minerals deal.
“There is still an opening here” for a peace deal, she said.
Ukraine condemns IAEA nuclear plant visit via Russian-occupied territory
Ukraine said on Sunday it condemned a “breach of territorial sovereignty” by employees of the UN nuclear watchdog who visited the Russia-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine via Russian-occupied territory.
In an emailed statement, Ukraine’s foreign ministry blamed “Russian blackmail and systematic attempts to impose upon international organisations illegal and contradictory mechanisms of operating on the temporarily occupied territories”.
A new monitoring mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived on Saturday at the Zaporizhzhia plant, which has been occupied by Russia since 2022, for the first time through Russian territory, the Russia-installed head of the plant said.
Previously, monitoring missions entered the Russian-occupied area from territory controlled by Kyiv. The IAEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
The IAEA rotation came after weeks of delay caused by military activity around the site, with each side blaming the other for violating rules to ensure the team’s safe passage to the plant. DM