Russia-Ukraine war live: UK says Putin will come to table ‘sooner or later’ as world leaders discuss peace plans
Starmer says Putin will ‘sooner or later’ have to come to table as summit begins
Keir Starmer has said Vladimir Putin will “sooner or later” have to “come to the table” as he urged world leaders to keep up the pressure on Russia for an unconditional ceasefire, reports PA news agency.
Key events
Faisal Ali
Akif Çağatay Kılıç, a foreign policy adviser to Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that one of the main obstacles to a peace settlement between Ukraine and Russia is a “loss of trust” between the two sides.
Turkey has played a key role as a mediator in talks and maintains good relations with both Kyiv and Moscow, despite its military support for Ukraine. It hosted negotiations in 2022 and has offered to do so again if called on.
Speaking to a Turkish TV station, Kılıç said:
The main problem is a loss of trust. Nobody trusts anyone.”
He referred cryptically to a group of politicians, no longer in power, who he claimed scuppered the initial February 2022 talks in Istanbul, noting that the conditions under which Ukraine is able to negotiate now have changed.
Kılıç said that in 2022 negotiations were aiming to limit Ukraine’s territorial losses to Russia at about 3% but that figure now is at about 25%.
UK prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Nato secretary general Mark Rutte have addressed the virtual “coalition of the willing” meeting, a government source told the PA news agency.
Starmer condemned Russia’s “barbaric attacks on Ukraine”, saying Vladimir Putin must “agree to a ceasefire”.
He said at the top of the meeting:
President Zelenskyy, who’s with us this morning, has shown once again that Ukraine is the party of peace, because he has agreed to and committed to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
Now what we see, and this is centrepiece for our discussions today, is that Putin is the one trying to delay.
In a sense, and you will know this, if Putin is serious about peace, it’s very simple, he has to stop his barbaric attacks on Ukraine and agree to a ceasefire.”
Starmer continued:
Secondly, being prepared to defend any deal ourselves through a coalition of the willing. We’ve begun that process and this morning we can take it forward.
And then, thirdly, and really importantly, given the developments of the last few days, to keep the pressure on Putin to come to the table, and I think collectively we’ve got a number of ways that we can do that.
So it’s those three heads, really, that we’re going to focus on in this meeting, strengthening Ukraine, being prepared to defend any deal ourselves through a coalition of the willing, and keeping that pressure on Russia at this crucial time.”
Speaking in Downing Street before the video call, UK prime minister Keir Starmer said the “world is watching”.
According to the PA news agency, Starmer said:
My feeling is that sooner or later (Putin’s) going to have to come to the table and engage in serious discussion, but – and this is a big but for us this morning in our meeting – we can’t sit back and simply wait for that to happen.
We have to keep pushing ahead, pushing forward, and preparing for peace, and a peace that will be secure and that will last.
I think that means strengthening Ukraine so they can defend themselves, and strengthening, obviously, in terms of military capability, in terms of funding, in terms of the provision of further support from all of us to Ukraine.”
Putin has to stop ‘barbaric attacks on Ukraine’ if ‘serious about peace’, says Starmer
UK prime minister Keir Starmer told a virtual meeting of about 25 world leaders on Saturday that they had to be prepared to defend any Ukraine peace deal themselves, urging them to keep up pressure on Russia.
“If (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is serious about peace, it’s very simple, he has to stop his barbaric attacks on Ukraine and agree to a ceasefire,” Starmer told the video call of leaders from nations, including from Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
He added:
We have to keep pushing ahead, pushing forward, and preparing for peace and a peace that will be secure and that will last.”
Starmer says Putin will ‘sooner or later’ have to come to table as summit begins
Keir Starmer has said Vladimir Putin will “sooner or later” have to “come to the table” as he urged world leaders to keep up the pressure on Russia for an unconditional ceasefire, reports PA news agency.
David Smith
While we wait for news from Keir Starmer’s virtual summit, my colleague David Smith in Washington has this piece on how Trump has transformed the US Republican party’s stance on Vladimir Putin…
In speech that ran for 100 minutes there was one moment when Donald Trump drew more applause from Democrats than Republicans. As the president told Congress last week how the US had sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, his political opponents clapped and unfurled a Ukrainian flag – while his own party sat in stony silence.
It was a telling insight into Republicans’ transformation, in the space of a generation, from a party of cold war hawks to one of “America first” isolationists. Where Trump has led, many Republicans have obediently followed, all the way into the embrace of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – with huge implications for the global democratic order.
Read the full piece here:
Ukraine said on Saturday it had downed 130 Russian-launched drones across the country at night, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Kyiv’s air force said the Iranian-made Shahed drones were downed over 14 regions and that Moscow had also attacked with two ballistic missiles.
Kyiv also said that the number of wounded in a Russian strike a day earlier on president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home town Kryvy Rig rose to 14. On Friday, officials said Russia attacked a residential area of the central Ukrainian city – regularly targeted throughout Moscow’s more than three-year invasion.
“Fourteen people were wounded, among them two children,” the head of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Sergiy Lysak, said on Telegram.
Ukrainian prosecutors said the injured children were a two-year-old and a 15-year-old.
Lysak said the missile attack destroyed more than a dozen large apartment buildings and 10 private houses.
Russian troops have recaptured the villages of Rubanshchina and Zaoleshenka in its western Kursk region, the defence ministry said on Saturday.
The Guardian has been unable to independently verify the report.
Ukraine’s largest private energy provider said on Saturday that overnight Russian airstrikes had damaged its energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions.
In a statement, DTEK said “damages are significant” and that some consumers in both regions were left without power, reports Reuters.
