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Keir Starmer to meet Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street Starmer meets Zelenskyy in No 10 after European leaders’ constructive Trump talks on Ukraine
(about 5 hours later)
London meeting comes as PM says Britain ready to ‘increase pressure’ on Moscow with further sanctions Ukrainian leader visits London after dialling in from Berlin for call with US president before Trump-Putin summit
Keir Starmer will be joined by the Ukrainian president at Downing Street on Thursday morning, as Europe braces for the outcome of Donald Trump’s face-to-face discussions with his Russian counterpart later this week. Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Keir Starmer in Downing Street on Thursday to discuss how Europe and the US could increase the economic and military pressure on Russia in the event that Vladimir Putin refuses to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine in his talks with Donald Trump on Friday in Alaska.
The UK prime minister’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy comes after he said Britain stood ready to “increase pressure” on Russia if necessary. Zelenskyy and a group of European leaders spoke with Trump and the US vice-president, JD Vance, by video call on Wednesday in what was seen as a constructive consultation setting the parameters for what Trump will seek to achieve in his meeting with Putin.
Meanwhile, Trump threatened Russia with “severe consequences” if a ceasefire was rejected by its leader. The Ukrainian president was at the side of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, in Berlin for the video call and his visit to London before returning to Kyiv underlines the importance of the UK in constructing a strategy not only to defeat Putin but to persuade Trump not to make excessive concessions to the Russian leader.
During a call with the US president and European allies on Wednesday, Starmer praised Trump for his work to bring forward a “viable” chance of an end to the war. Starmer greeted Zelenskyy in the street outside the door of No 10 with an enthusiastic bear hug.
Concerns have been raised over Zelenskyy’s exclusion from the meeting between Trump and Putin, which is scheduled to take place in Alaska. Trump has said he will quickly seek to hold a second, trilateral summit involving himself, Putin and Zelenskyy if Putin agrees to this format in their bilateral in Alaska. Any such meeting would be a concession by Putin since he refuses to recognise Zelenskyy as a legitimate leader of Ukraine, but Zelenskyy needs to be ready in case in the next few days he suddenly finds himself in a negotiating room with Trump and Putin.
Speaking on Wednesday, Starmer said: “This meeting on Friday that President Trump is attending is hugely important. As I’ve said personally to President Trump for the three-and-a-bit years this conflict has been going on, we haven’t got anywhere near a prospect of actually a viable solution, a viable way of bringing it to a ceasefire. Trust in Trump’s reliability is low among European leaders but they emerged relieved from the video call with the US president, sensing that he understood it was not his right to start negotiating “land swaps” or details of a final peace settlement with Putin in Alaska.
“And now we do have that chance because of the work of that the president has put in.” Trump appeared to agree his primary task was to test out whether Putin was willing to agree a ceasefire, and on what conditions. Putin has to balance risking damaging his relationship with Trump, his best path out of the war, and trying to crush Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
Further sanctions could be imposed on Russia should the Kremlin fail to engage, and the UK was already working on its next package of measures targeting Moscow, he said. Trump has frequently said he will only know if he can achieve peace in Ukraine by meeting Putin personally. He sets great faith in his personal relationship with the Russian leader, but in remarks after his video meeting with the European leaders he played down expectations of what he could do to persuade Putin to relent. At the same time he warned there would be “very severe consequences” for Russia if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire, a veiled threat to increase US sanctions on Russian oil exports.
“We’re ready to support this, including from the plans we’ve already drawn up to deploy a reassurance force once hostilities have ceased,” he told allies. “It is important to remind colleagues that we do stand ready also to increase pressure on Russia, particularly the economy, with sanctions and wider measures as may be necessary.” He has so far held off from imposing such economic pressure on Russia, but by the end of the month the US is due to impose additional tariffs on Indian imports into the US as a punishment for India continuing to buy Russian oil.
Starmer and European leaders have said repeatedly that discussions about Ukraine should not happen without Kyiv’s involvement, amid concerns the country is being sidelined in negotiations about its future. The UK would like to see the US consider other, more targeted sanctions, either on the so-called shadow fleet of Russian oil tankers or on refineries that use Russian oil. But Moscow briefed that the Alaska summit, far from leading to extra economic pressure on the Russian economy, would instead include discussion and agreements on new US-Russian economic cooperation, a step that would relieve the pressure on Russian state finances.
Asked if it was his decision to not invite Zelenskyy to the meeting, Trump said “no, just the opposite”, before adding that a second meeting with the Ukrainian president could take place afterwards. European leaders in the call with Trump avoided any confrontation but firmly backed the red lines that have been set out by Zelenskyy in recent days, including over land swaps – in practice the handing over of Ukrainian territory to Russia.
“We had a very good call, he was on the call, President Zelenskyy was on the call. I would rate it a 10, you know, very, very friendly,” he told reporters in Washington. Some European leaders took heart from the detailed grasp of the issues shown by Vance and by hints that Trump could be willing to contribute US assets to a European-led security guarantee for Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement. Vance in particular reassured Europe that the US had no intention of negotiating away Ukrainian territory at the Alaska summit. He was described as “fully apprised” of the need to implement some mechanism that would prevent Putin from trying to subvert any peace agreement, either militarily or by actively undermining the legitimacy of the Zelenskyy government.
He added: “There’s a very good chance that we’re going to have a second meeting which will be more productive than the first, because the first is ‘I’m going to find out where we are and what we’re doing’.” The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, used Wednesday’s meeting with Trump to warn about the potential consequences of Ukraine being forced to concede swathes of territory it holds in the Donetsk region. Rutte told Trump that Putin’s proposal made to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff would mean opening a “highway” for the Russian army to advance to Kyiv, according to two participants.
The US president has previously suggested a truce could involve some “swapping” of land. The Alaska summit, due to start at 11.30am local time (2030 BST) will include a one-to-one meeting between Trump and Putin, with translators, before broadening into a wider meeting.
It is believed one of the Russian leader’s demands is for Ukraine to cede parts of the Donbas region that it still controls. But Zelenskyy has rejected any proposal that would compromise Ukraine’s territorial integrity, something that is forbidden by the country’s constitution. The Russian delegation will include the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; the defence minister, Andrei Belousov; the finance minister, Anton Siluanov; and the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.
A joint statement from the Coalition of the Willing, a European-led effort to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine in the event of truce, which is co-chaired by Starmer, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said “international borders must not be changed by force”. The two leaders are expected to give a joint press conference at the end of the summit.
It added: “Sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia’s war economy should be strengthened if Russia does not agree to a ceasefire in Alaska.” Merz said he had been reassured that Trump intends to make the ceasefire demand “one of his priorities” on Friday. He said: “So far, all talks with Putin over the past three-and-a-half years have been accompanied by an even tougher military response. This time it has to be different.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said Trump had agreed that territorial issues in Ukraine could only be negotiated in the presence of Zelenskyy.
Speaking on Wednesday, Starmer said: “This meeting on Friday that President Trump is attending is hugely important. We haven’t got anywhere near a prospect of actually a viable solution, a viable way of bringing it to a ceasefire. And now we do have that chance, because of the work that the president has put in.”