The Prime Minister will deliver a statement on Britain’s “defence and security” on Tuesday ahead of his crunch meeting with Donald Trump. Sir Keir Starmer is under increasing pressure to increase the UK’s defence spending amid the war in Ukraine. He is due to meet the US President in Washington later this week.
The United States will have to work closely with the UK and Europe to deliver a lasting peace in Ukraine, the Home Secretary said ahead of Sir Keir's trip to Washington. The transatlantic alliance has been put under severe strain by Mr Trump's approach to ending the war, with the US president opening talks with Russia's Vladimir Putin, branding Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky a "dictator" and suggesting Kyiv's forces were to blame for the conflict.
The PM’s visit to the White House follows France's Emmanuel Macron's talks with Mr Trump on Monday as European nations seek to influence the President's views on the future of Ukraine. Mr Macron suggested a truce between Russia and Ukraine could be possible within weeks, allowing time for more detailed peace negotiations.
The French president said he had worked with Sir Keir on plans to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to safeguard a lasting deal - as long as Mr Trump was also prepared to offer security guarantees. He told Fox News: "We worked very hard together with the UK prime minister to have a French-UK proposal to say we are ready to send troops, not to go to the front line, not to go in confrontation, but to be in some locations, being defined by the treaty, as a presence to maintain this peace and our collective credibility with the US backup and the US backstop.".
Ms Cooper suggested Sir Keir's talks with Mr Trump would cover those issues. "This is a very important stage in the discussions," she told BBC Radio 4's Today. "What we need to achieve is to get a lasting peace for Ukraine. And that has to mean that Ukraine has to be at the heart of this. You cannot have talks about Ukraine without Ukraine.
"And the US, the UK, Europe will need to work very closely together to ensure that we can make sure we can get that lasting peace for Ukraine, that it would have the security guarantees that we need. "We know that means European countries need to do more, but we also need the security backstop with the US.".
