France is proposing a partial one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron and his foreign minister have said, as European efforts to bolster support for Kyiv accelerate in the face of uncertain US backing.
The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said on Monday: “Such a truce – on air, sea and energy infrastructure – would allow us to determine whether Vladimir Putin is acting in good faith”. He said it would also enable Europe to gauge Putin’s attitude to “real peace negotiations”.
A day after European leaders rallied around Ukraine at a summit in London, Barrot added: “Never has the risk of a war in Europe, in the EU, been so high … The threat keeps getting closer to us, the frontline keeps getting closer to us.”
His comments picked up on those of the French president, who suggested France and the UK had agreed on a plan for a short-term partial ceasefire that would not cover ground fighting, with troops to be deployed to Ukraine in a second phase.
Ukraine’s president, Voldoymyr Zelenskyy, would not say whether he supported the proposal – though he did tell reporters at a press briefing that he was familiar with it. “I am aware of everything,” he said on Sunday night.
Zelenskyy also emphasised that a ceasefire would mean little without Ukraine obtaining immediate security guarantees from allies. He said Russia had broken the ceasefire that ran between 2014 and early 2022 in Ukraine “25 times” and that it was likely to do so again without external intervention.
The UK armed forces minister Luke Pollard said the French suggestion was not a plan Britain currently recognised and added that no agreement had been reached on what a truce might look like. “But we are working together with France and our European allies to look at what is the path to how … we create a lasting and durable peace,” he said.
Donald Trump planned to convene top White House officials on Monday to discuss next steps, which included reviewing the European proposal but also considering a cutoff in aid to Ukraine, according to reports in the New York Times and other US media. Those set to join the briefing include the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth.
Waltz briefly took questions on Ukraine while walking towards the West Wing. He declined to say whether the US would accept the European proposal but welcomed the efforts by Macron and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. “We welcome the Europeans taking a lead in European security,” Waltz said. “I mean, that’s been an underpinning. They have to invest in the capability to do that. They’re certainly showing a will.”
Trump allies continued to pile pressure on Zelenskyy over the weekend, with several suggesting the Ukrainian president should consider resigning in order to provide a way forward for negotiations. Rubio and Waltz were considered to be the most hawkish of Trump’s cabinet on Russia, but have fallen in line with the criticism of Ukraine by Trump and the US vice-president, JD Vance,, as tensions have escalated.
Speaking to Fox on Monday morning, Waltz did not say Zelenskyy should resign, but when asked whether Zelenskyy was fit to lead Ukraine said: “What happened Friday really put that up in the air.”
European leaders, the head of Nato, Mark Rutte, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, met in London on Sunday in the aftermath of an acrimonious exchange between Zelenskyy and Trump.
Starmer, who convened the London talks, said afterwards that the leaders led by the UK and France had agreed to draw up a Ukraine peace plan that would be presented to the Trump administration.
Zelenskyy said on Sunday he expected a plan to emerge on paper “in the coming weeks”. He added that a growing number of countries were ready to support it, naming Turkey and the eight Baltic and Nordic states as being willing to help.
Although he referenced a need for western backing, Zelenskyy said his best security guarantee was “a strong Ukrainian army” and notably did not repeat previous suggestions that a peacekeeping force of 100,000-150,000 would be desirable.
European leaders have been told by the US that it will not participate, leaving Britain and France to propose creating a “reassurance force” of up to 30,000 that would secure Ukrainian airports and key infrastructure.
But Zelenskyy said that to be credible, that force would need some support from the US, particularly in “air defence and intelligence”. He said he believed Washington would remain a partner, even if his personal relationship with Trump had collapsed after the White House row.
Meanwhile, fighting continued on the battlefield in Ukraine. Ukraine has made some small-scale counterattacks around the western edge of Toretsk, a frontline city in Donetsk, while Russia pushed on with a long-running assault on the eastern city of Pokrovsk.
Russia’s defence ministry has also claimed it killed 150 Ukrainian soldiers at a base near the city of Dnipro. The new commander of Ukraine’s land forces, Maj Gen Mykhailo Drapatyi, described the strike on Saturday as “terrible” and said he was launching an investigation into why so many service personnel gathered together in the open.
A long-range Ukrainian drone overnight hit an old refinery in Ufa, more than 870 miles (1,400km) from Ukraine’s border. The Ufimsky refinery is one of the biggest in Russia and supplies fuel to the country’s armed forces.
The Kremlin, which has rejected the idea of any western troops in Ukraine, said on Monday the results of the European summit would allow fighting to continue, adding that Zelenskyy must be forced to change his stance and seek peace.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said Friday’s Oval Office clash showed how difficult it would be to reach a settlement on the conflict, and that Russia would continue to negotiate with the US on normalising the countries’ bilateral ties.
“We see that the collective west has partially begun to lose its collectivity,” Peskov said.
Friedrich Merz, who is likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, suggested the Oval Office spat was a trap set in advance for the Ukrainian leader. “It was not a spontaneous reaction to interventions by Zelenskyy, but obviously a manufactured escalation,” Merz said.
A senior European official who asked to remain anonymous said Trump now had to choose whether he wanted to call himself “a leader of the free world, or leader of an extortion gang. The latter is not interesting for Europe.”
Zelenskyy said on Monday that he would work with Europe on the terms for a possible peace deal to present to the US. The Ukrainian president said on Telegram: “In the near future, all of us in Europe will shape our common positions – the lines we must achieve and the lines we cannot compromise on. These positions will be presented to our partners in the United States.”
In a video showing damage from Russian attacks on Ukraine, Zelenskyy said Kyiv needed “strong support from our partners”, with Moscow launching “more than 1,050 attack drones, nearly 1,300 aerial bombs, and more than 20 missiles” in the past week.
Amid talk in Europe of the biggest US policy reversal since the second world war, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said she would inform EU member states on Tuesday about plans to strengthen the the bloc’s defence industry and military capabilities.
“We need a massive surge in defence, without any question. We want lasting peace, but lasting peace can only be built on strength, and strength begins with strengthening ourselves,” she said.
With some leaders calling for EU countries to raise their defence budgets to 3-3.5% of gross domestic product, German coalition talks have raised the prospect of a huge boom in spending – including defence and infrastructure funds worth hundreds of billions of euros.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Moscow-friendly prime minister, criticised the London summit, saying European leaders “decided … they want to go on with the war instead of opting for peace” and describing their approach as “bad, dangerous and mistaken”.
Orbán and Slovakia’s prime minister, Robert Fico, are likely to challenge and may veto the conclusions of an extraordinary EU summit on Thursday to discuss support for Ukraine, European security guarantees and how to pay for European defence needs.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Zelenskyy’s office, said successive American presidents had tried to improve relations with Russia – without ever achieving any tangible results.
“The list of American attempts to reach out to the Kremlin could go on indefinitely. Why were there so many? Because each previous attempt, unfortunately for the world but entirely predictably, ended in failure,” he posted on social media.
Podolyak added: “Generations of American politicians come and go, yet Russia’s inability to adhere to the rules of civilised international coexistence remains constant.”
