Britain’s prime minister has no choice. In saying “I do not think the US is an unreliable ally”, Sir Keir Starmer is showing that hope is winning over recent experience. Whether he is being diplomatic, or naïve, will be put to the test when he presents a multinational plan for peace in Ukraine to Donald Trump.
Whatever the French and British-led multinational proposals are, they will have to avoid sliding into the death trap of a ceasefire.
Starmer painstakingly avoided using the dreaded term. But it’s one that would delight Vladimir Putin. And it has already been used by Trump.
“[Ukraine] didn’t want to talk about a ceasefire. A ceasefire could take place immediately,” Trump said shortly after the spectacular breakdown of his talks with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.
Oleksandr Morezkho, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee said, after Starmer chaired the multinational meeting, a “ceasefire would only be a delayed death for us”.
A ceasefire is not a peace treaty.
While being shouted down by JD Vance in the Oval Office, Zelensky tried to remind the US presidential team that Russia had violated multiple ceasefires. He pointed out that both Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, and Emanuel Macron, the French president, has assured him Putin would stick to ceasefire terms in late 2021 – and then invaded a few months later.
“The biggest problem is that it will be used by Putin as a tool of war. He might agree to ceasefire only when it creates conditions allowing him to destroy Ukraine maybe a little bit later,” Morekho told The Independent.
Zelensky had already set off for an audience with the King at Sandringham after attending the Lancaster House summit, but he appeared to have driven home the importance of language in defence of his country.
Starmer said: “We've agreed that the UK, France and others will work with Ukraine on a plan to stop the fighting. Then we'll discuss that plan with the United States and take it forward together. The purpose of today's meeting was to unite our partners around this effort to strengthen Ukraine and to support a just, and enduring peace, for the good of all of us. Our starting point must be to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position.”
That does not mean a ceasefire. Putin badly needs time to retrain, rearm, and resupply his forces. So does Ukraine. But Russia is isolated, reliant on a coalition of rogue states like Iran and North Korea, has a smaller economy than Italy and is being outgunned in drone warfare by Kyiv.
Trump has not, yet, signalled whether the US will cut aid to Ukraine. He has threatened to. The UK has been quick to signal that Europe may need to fill the gap left by an even more drastic pro-Russian shift from the White House.
“So that they [Ukraine] can negotiate from a position of strength and we are doubling down in our support. Yesterday evening the UK signed a £2.2bn loan to provide more military aid to Ukraine, backed not by the British taxpayer but by the profits from frozen Russian assets. And today I'm announcing a new deal which allows Ukraine to use £1.6bn of UK export finance to buy more than 5,000 air defence missiles,” Starmer said.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen insisted that “we want the US to know that we are ready to defend democracy”.
There was a lot of talk of providing, or thinking about, peacekeeping or protection forces for Ukraine in the event of a peace deal with Russia. But there is no peace proposal on the table that Ukraine has signed up to and therefore no peace to keep or protect.
The London conference has galvanised German chancellor Olaf Scholz to declare that “we need to financially and militarily support Ukraine” and his outgoing administration is trying to negotiate a series of packages that would increase spending on defence and on Ukraine.
Starmer laid out a course towards a peace deal. Not a ceasefire. It is at odds with every signal that has come from the Trump administration, but it could allow the White House to remain the lead in talks with Putin – if Trump were to agree to strengthening a nation he’s accused of “gambling with world war three”.
The prime minister said there had been an agreement at Lancaster House that “we will keep the military aid flowing and keep increasing the economic pressure on Russia”.
“Second, we agreed that any lasting peace must ensure Ukraine's sovereignty and security, and Ukraine must be at the table. Third, in the event of a peace deal, we will keep boosting Ukraine's own defensive capabilities to deter any future invasion. Fourth, we will go further to a coalition of the willing to defend a deal in Ukraine and to guarantee the peace,” he added.
Trump has said that Ukraine won’t get all its territory back from Russia and that the US would not be part of a security guarantee in any peace deal either.
If Europe can present Trump with a cast iron European plan for the safety of Ukraine and protection for its sovereignty – he may endorse their efforts.
But that assumes, as Starmer hopes, that the US under the 47th president remains a reliable ally. A sure sign that it is not would be to demand a ceasefire from Ukraine ahead of talks. Russia wants one urgently but it would be suicide for Kyiv. And Trump knows it.
